Ready to eat our Thanksgiving feast :)

We LOVED every second of our Thanksgiving feast! I want to thank all of my parents that helped make out feast so great.  You guys are amazing :) 

This year our class dressed up as pilgrims for our feast.  Ask your kinder to tell you all about the pilgrims and their voyage to America.  I think they will surprise you!!

Pilgrim friends at our feast

We left with full bellies and smiles on our faces!  I would say our feast was a great success :)

Mrs. Marple surprised us at the end of the day and helped us make mini pumpkin pies and boy were they delicious.  

2 spoonfuls of vanilla pudding

1 spoonful of pumpkin

 stir it all together, scoop it into pie crust, add some whip cream

and enjoy :)

Hoping that you and your families have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

One of those crazy mixed up weeks!

Oh, what a week this has been! 

We had a jammed packed schedule of learning and special projects crammed into three crazy mixed up half days!  This week we have spent A LOT of time with Mrs. Andaloro's a.m. kinders and we have really enjoyed their company.

On Tuesday, our classes had our Veteran's celebration that we have been preparing for since last week.  Ms. Mader (Ethan's mom from Mrs. Andaloro's class) is leaving for Afghanistan next month.  We thought it would be a good idea to honor her, as well as, a few of our other veteran friends.

A.M. and P.M. kinders dressed to impress in their red, white, and blue!

Mr. Cheeseman, Nick's grandpop, explaining how far away Afghanistan is.

Mr. Cheeseman (Marines), Ms. Mader (Navy), Mr. Kueny (Marines) did a great job answering all of the questions our curious kinders had. 

Both the a.m and p.m. class worked really hard practicing these three songs we sang to our special guests.  They did an awesome job considering their teacher is the WORST singer in the entire world and can barely hold a tune!! :)

Loving the delicious red, white, and blue cupcakes Mrs. Andaloro made for us!

Nicolas showing his grandpop the holiday cards we made for our military friends in Afghanistan.  Mrs. Mader is bringing them with her when she leaves in December.  Even though our Navy friends will be far from home on the holidays, they will know that we are all thinking of them! Check out my previous post to see our cards.

Nicolas and Joseph gave these certificates to their special veteran. 

Joseph was loving every second that he shared with his dad!

Nicolas also loved the time he got to spend with his grandpop!

Since we have been doing such an AMAZING job during our Fundations block, I thought I would test out a student led drill sounds session.  Anna was our lucky friend that had the chance to run Fundations.  She did an AWESOME job.  Each day, a new kinder will get a chance to lead our sound drill portion of the program.  They are all so excited for their turn!

We have been hard at work practicing writing our numbers (1-20) and we can never have enough practice.  At conferences, parents were given a copy of our number book that we use to write our numbers in school.   Make sure you are practicing forming numbers at home with your child!

Our 10 Black Dots class book has been bound and ready for our classroom library.  Check out our creative ideas and our awesome writing.  I'm so proud of how great my kinders are doing sounding out their words and writing down the sounds they hear, and I'm so happy to learn that my friends have been practicing their writing at home :)

We also finished our making our Thanksgiving place mats for our Thanksgiving feast.

....and a HUGE thank you to one of our AMAZING room mom's, Mrs. Schlagle, for making all of our pilgrim hats, bonnets, and bibs.  They came out great!

One of those crazy mixed up weeks!

We are thankful for...

Our  "I am thankful" wall is finally finished.  This month, we have been working on the sight word "I," so what better way to practice than writing about what we are thankful for :)

Before our writing activity, we read the book Thanks for Thanksgiving.  We talked about what it meant to be thankful and each student shared one thing they were thankful for this year.  

Thanks to our Fundations program, we are getting really good at sounding out our words and writing down the sounds we hear.  This one is almost right on!  Keep encouraging your child to practice sounding out words at home while writing.

We also have been learning about family.  We did a fun fingerplay I found online called A Family Fingerplay:

This is a family  

Let's count them and see,

How many there are,

And who they can be 

This is the mother

Who loves everyone

And this is the father

Who is lots of fun.

This is my sister 

She helps and she plays,

And this is the baby

He's growing each day.

But who is this one?

He's out there alone,

Why it's Jackie, the dog,

And he's chewing a bone.

After our finger play, we brainstormed what the word 'family' meant to us.

  Here are some of our thoughts:

Red, White, and Blue for you!

This week our kinders were busy bee's.  We had a jammed packed schedule and our crazy mixed up half days didn't make it any easier!  For one of our service learning projects, we are teaming up with Mrs. Andaloro's A.M. kinders to give a special thank you to all those who fight for our country.  Our special Veteran's Day project takes place on Tuesday, but here's a little sneak peek into all of the hard work we have put in to making this day so special: 

Step 1:  Cutting out our red, white, and blue bears

I was excited to see how far we have come with our scissor skills.  At the beginning of the year, some of my friends would have had a really hard time with this, but thanks to all of our practice we have become really good cutters. Keep up the great work friends, and remember to practice at home :)

Step 2:  Putting together our holiday cards for the military

We twisted on our listening ears and practiced following step by step directions.  My friends did a really great job finding the letters I was asking for them to glue by listening for the sound clues.  By the time we got to the letter "s," they realized what we were trying to spell.  We talked about what the United States of America was and why were writing it on our cards to our military friends.  

We added a little extra love to our batch of bears with these special hearts.  We warmed our heart with our hands to make sure our military friends keep warm this winter.  We held our heats up to our heads to remind our friends we are always thinking of them, and we gave our hearts a great big smooch to show how thankful we are for everything our military does for us.  

Mrs. Andaloro wrote this really cute poem that we used on the inside of the card.  We practiced left to right directionality, using the return sweep, matching text to spoken word,  reading our sight word "I," and writing our names.

Step 3:  Sending love your way

One of my friends suggested that we make hearts and send them with our cards.  I thought that was a great idea!  We used sponges and red and blue paint to decorate our hearts.  Everyone's is a little different, but they all look AMAZING!

Some of my friends practiced making the first letter in their name with the paint...

and others decided to make special designs...

No matter what they chose to do, each heart came out great!

We added this special poem that I made to finish off our hearts:

This is what our finished product looked like:

Halloweenie...and everything in between!

My spook-tacular room parents helped make our Halloween party absolutely batty!  We loved every second of it--especially the fun-filled centers.

At the creative station,  we got to make the cutest Frankenstein crafts ever!  Some friends made Frankie scary, while others decided to make Frankie silly. 

At our math station, we practiced identifying numbers 1-100 with our candy corn bingo.  My friends marked their numbers with candy corn once they were called, and I'm sure they took a taste or two while they waited :)

At our science center, student's entered Dr. Eek's Monster Lab.  It was their job to help build our monster using their senses.  We felt mummy fingers, eyeballs, monster brains, and smelled stinky bat feet.  It was priceless watching their faces!

Take a peek at our creative costumes, our adorable witch cupcakes, and our Halloween party.

In math, we have been working a lot with patterns.  During center time, my friends have been recognizing, reading, extending, and creating their own patterns.  I thought it would be fun to work monster patterns and candy corn patterns for the month of October.

Also, in centers, students worked on counting skills (1-25) in our Cauldron Counting center.  Students had to place the correct amount of candy corn in each cauldron to help finish Miss Farrell's Halloween brew.