Substitute Award Winners

The kindergarten teachers were in a meeting all morning today and the class had their first substitute teacher! They did an excellent job and I asked the substitute to choose 3 students who were exceptional leaders and followed directions all morning. Kyron, Lexi and David were chosen to win the "Substitute Award!" Way to go!

Shape Making!

To practice our shapes today, we took our math tubs and traced each of the four basic shapes around the lines. After making all of the shapes, we traded tubs and made new ones!

Searching for Shapes!

For our second mini-lesson we searched our room for basic shapes. We found many rectangles, squares, circles and a few triangles!

PBIS Celebration

We kicked off our first school wide PBIS celebration this week with Basketball Jones. He came in with encouraging words, dancin' music and crazy basketball spinning skills. The entire school did an excellent job following directions, being a fabulous audience and participating during many different activities. Students with a certain percentage of good behavior each nine weeks will get the opportunity to attend other school wide celebrations!

ABCs Poem

Work on Writing

We started building our stamina with our second Daily 5 choice today, Work on Writing. We started off by modeling all of the aspects of this new choice. One of the most important parts is that the students have to have a book out and open to one of their favorite pages and are to respond to the picture by writing and illustrating a response to the picture. Right now at the beginning of kindergarten, most students copy the picture down exactly and will add words from the page onto their page and/or label their picture. We will continue to build stamina with this new choice the rest of this week and will hopefully soon be choosing between Read to Self AND Work on Writing!

Things We Love

For our first writing assessment prompt with our new writing program the class was told to write and draw about something they love. Before we began we created a class popplet making a list of things we love to help kickstart and generate a few ideas. Some of the students used one or two of these ideas and a few others came up with something else once they returned to their seats to write!

First Poem of the Week!

Today we performed our first poem of the week. Our sight word was the word "I" and the poem had this word in it 5 times! We enjoyed reading, practicing and doing the motions with our poem this week. Way to go to the students who completed their very first poem!

Hard Working Vowels

This week we focused on our hard working vowels. We practiced their sounds and Zoo Phonics motions, sang songs and matched pictures to the sound the letter makes! Our favorite video this week was called "Vowel Bat".

Read To Self...10 Minutes of Stamina!

I'm so happy I could cry tears of joy....that's what I told my group of 19 kindergartners today after our second round of building stamina with Read to Self. We started the week off getting to 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes and even 4 minutes one day. But today, we made it to 7 minutes and then 10 minutes. I could not be more proud of these beginning readers and how far they've come in a weeks time. Way to go boys and girls!

Play Centers

On Friday, we got to know one another a little bit better by learning and sharing through our play centers. We have 5 total centers that the students rotated between. Learning to share and get along as classmates is sometimes difficult and it important to practice not only at the beginning of the year, but throughout the entire school year.

Read 2 Self...Day 1!

The students have been hard at work practicing and building their Read to Self stamina. We first learned how to read a book in three ways! They can read the pictures, read the words and retell a familiar story. They have been doing great! We even got up to 6 minutes of stamina one time already!

Meet the new faces of Mrs. Brown's Kindergarten Class!

Drum roll please.........

We had such a fun first day of school getting to know one another and learning all about our classroom and school. I am excited to get into even more teaching and learning on the second, third, fourth and every day after this year! We enjoyed our first day of meeting new friends and learning....here they are!