Sea Life Learning...

We have been very busy learning about Sea Life. The first animal we learned about was FISH! Take a peek at some of the students in the AM class sharing what they wrote about FISH!

Make a video - it's fun, easy and free!
www.onetruemedia.com

Check back for more sharing!

We're Back and Making Graphs...

Kindergarten started for us almost a month ago. We've been very busy getting to know each other and learning the classroom routines. We've visited the Library, Computer Lab and Gym. We are learning to read books, explore websites, jump rope, ride scooters and more. In class we are learning to work with partners and in small groups. We are learning how to read the calendar, count money, graph the weather and so much more. We read a few books about kids with really long names. We graphed to see how many letters we have in our names.

Name Graph (PM Class)

Name Graph (AM Class)

We also made a scatter graph of our birthdays.November is our busiest month for birthdays. December is the loneliest with ZERO birthdays!

Please visit our blog again soon to hear and see more of what's going on in our class!

Backyard Birds...

We've spent several days learning about some of the local birds...ones we can find in our own backyards. We  learned about the ROBIN, CARDINAL, BLUE-JAY, SPARROW, and HUMMINGBIRD. We made a book about them and drew the bird and included interesting details about the bird. Later, we got to choose one of the birds to write about. Here are some of the kids sharing their writing...

Backyard Birds from Mrs. Blakely on Vimeo.

George and Abe

A few weeks ago we learned about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. We LOVE learning new things. We read some books, watched a few short videos and saw several pictures of them. We had fun drawing portraits of both Mr. Washington and Mr. Lincoln and placed them in the hallway outside of our classroom for everyone in our school to see. We also got to write about these two famous men. Some of us read our writing to the class. Now we can share with the world!!
Take a peek at some of what we shared....

George & Abe from Mrs. Blakely on Vimeo.

Happy Birthday Abraham Lincoln

Today we learned about Abraham Lincoln. We had a special speaker from First Grade come to share with us about her visit to his home in Springfield, IL. Katelin learned about Mr. Lincoln last year when she was in Kindergarten. Over the summer, her parents took her to Springfield to see his home! How exciting! Thanks so much for sharing with us Katelin. you Rock!
Here's a video to learn a little more about our 16th President!

Buddy Reading

We have been working hard all year to become better readers. Everyone in our class can find a book they can read. Sometimes we read  alone, "silently". But other times we get to read to a buddy! Who do you like to read to? Where is your favorite place to read?

Will He or Won't He?

We are wondering if the Groundhog will see his shadow tomorrow. We made our predictions in class today. 29 of us thought he WON'T see it and 18 of us thought he WOULD see his shadow. Which kids are right? We'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out for sure!

Kindergarten Snow Suit Designs

We recently read the book Thomas' Snowsuit by Robert Munsch. It was a very funny book. Afterwards we traced templates to make our own snowsuit kids. What do you think of our designs?

Kindergarten Snowsuits from Cindy Blakely on Vimeo.

Nice Block Sculpture

It's been a long time since our last post, but we're back and ready to share. Take a quick look at a WONDERFUL sculpture made by Victor. He made it all by himself and shared that he was able to make it stand without falling because he made a "wide base". ;-)
Can you say future engineer? ;-)

Math Games with Partners...

We love working with partners in class. We played a new math game that has a spinner built right into the paper. We used a paper clip and pencil as the spinner. We used teddy bears as our markers. We had fun! Take a look at some of the kids playing with their partners:

School Is In Session...

Another school year has started. And we're off to have lots of fun while learning. It's taking a while to get all of our permission slips back so we can post photos of us doing our work in class. But in the meantime, we'll share that we have two classes, AM and PM. There are 27 kids in the AM and 26 in the PM. We have 15 girls and 12 boys in the AM class. There are 13 girls and 13 boys in the PM class. So far we have been working on letters, sounds, counting, patterning and beginning reading skills....just to name a few. Please come back soon and see what's going on in Kindegarten!

Our Boy/Girl Graphs

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle...

This week we've talked about things people can do to help reduce the amount of garbage we make. We also talked about the damage so much garbage can do to the earth and the animals that live here. A few years back we had a visitor who spoke with the kids about Reducing, Reusing and Recycling. She brought some wonderful things that were made from reusing other materials. Take a look, you'll be just as surprised as we were...

We Love Shaving Cream

We have been working hard on learning sight words, word families, numeral writing, drawing and more. It's fun to do this on paper, but it's even MORE fun to do it in shaving cream!! Take a look at how we practiced our skills (and cleaned our tables of old dried-up glue gunk at that same time!) ;-)

Do you play in shaving cream too?

Artist in the Making...

 Wait...no artist MADE!!....Take a look at the BEAUTIFUL bird Viktoria painted. She is enrolled in an art class outside of school and asked her instructor if she could paint a bird. Remember, we were learning about birds and how to draw them a few weeks ago? Apparently, this made an impression on Viktoria and she wanted to make more! ;-)
 WOW!!! Can you believe she painted this? I understand she had a little help from her art teacher....but this is AMAZING don't you think? Way to go!!

Sea Life Unit...the Beginning...

Today we started our Sea Life Unit. We brainstormed things we think we know about fish. We thought about what fish CAN do and what fish HAVE. As we learn more about fish, we may have to change some of the things on our charts. We used Kidspiration to make the following charts about fish:



AM Class







PM Class



We are birdwatchers...

We had so much fun learning about backyard birds. The weather has been very nice and the birds are tweeting and beginning to set up their nests. We made a book of the birds to take home and use as a guide when birdwatching. Here are just a few of the wonderful drawings in our books...

It's almost hard to believe these artists are Kindergartners, don't you think?

Backyard Birds...

We have spent several days learning about all sorts of birds that can be found in our own backyards. Today we learned about the HUMMINGBIRD! We watched a bit of this video in class. It's very interesting but too long to watch all of it at school, so the link is here in case you want to watch it at home:



Click on image to view video



George Washington...

We learned about George Washington, the very FIRST PRESIDENT of the United States of America. We made a little book and read it together and we watched this video:

Happy Birthday Abe Lincoln

This past week we learned about President Lincoln. We drew step-by-step portraits of Mr. Lincoln:

We Know Abe Lincoln

We spent time today learning about Abraham Lincoln. We made a book about his life and watched this video too. We learned that our state, Illinois, is called "The Land of Lincoln"