Saint Nicholas

Today December 6th is St. Nicholas Day. St. Nicholas arrives on a donkey and leaves treats in children's shoes that are left beside the fireplace. The children in return leave hay and carrots for the donkey. We put our shoes outside by our fireplace while we completed our work and St. Nicholas came and visited!!! We were so excited. 

Santa delivered an elf to our class on December 1 and we names him Snowflake. He also delivered a CFIE Santa Cam to the school. 

We also celebrated Bentley and Quincy being students of the month for October and November.

Busy Week

We were all a little tired but happy to be back in school after a long break off for Thanksgiving. We began learning all about Christmas Around the World and reviewed our classroom sight words.

On Thursday this week we came back to our classroom after computer lab and found a gift from Santa to our classroom. We received an elf on the shelf and after lots of discussion and voting we decided to name him Snowflake. He will be a new and fun addition to our classroom through the Christmas season. We also celebrated our International Christmas Fair. It was a wonderful night with ornaments for sale, pictures with Santa, all you can eat pancakes, and a silent auction.

Here is our classroom quilt. Soleil's family made the winning bid and
was able to take it home. 

Friday was a great day with PJ Day to help our school music program AND a popsicle party. Yes, you read that right. Our class had the most eagle feathers for K-2 grades and was given a popsicle party from the office. We were very excited. 

Slacking :)

Alright so I have been super busy so therefore slacking on the blog. You will have to bear with me as I try this new addition this year.

Since our last post we have had our first report card go home and our first award ceremony. (Here are a few pictures of some of our families that came.) I am proud of all of the hard work each child put into this nine weeks. We will continue to push the children so be prepared. They are all very capable and bright and I will expect a lot out of them.

The school PTO has our first Chipolte Night and raised money for the school. Thank you for all that came out and supported this event.

We worked hard and prepared a Thanksgiving PowWow for our parents with speaking parts for each child. They did such a wonderful job. We also ate a "traditional" first Thanksgiving meal. :) Thank you to all of the parents that helped by donating and coming to celebrate with us.

I am looking forward to December. It is a busy but beautiful month.

Halloween

We had a wonderful week dressing up to celebrate Saying No to Drugs! I forgot to take a lot of pictures but here is one of a few of us being too bright for drugs. 

Today was Halloween and we voted on, measured, weighed, carved etc. all to Wilber our class pumpkin. We found out that although Wilber was heavy he still floated in a bucket of water. We figured that it is because he is actually hollow. To end the day we had some yummy pumpkin cookies.All in all, Mrs. Ketchum said it was the best Halloween she has ever had in Kindergarten. :) 

Wilber the pumpkin

Our voting on how to carve Wilber.

Digging out seeds

More seeds...

And even more seeds...

Finally Wilber has a face!!!

Fun in Kindergarten

This week we learned all about Fire Safety and how to take care of ourselves and our families  in a fire. We also made fire trucks and charted about fire safety. 

Fire safety week

Kylie posing to support fire safety week

We had Open House and many of our parents came out to tour our classroom, see what all we had been learning, and visit our book fair. Here are a few of our families. 

Abbygail and her family. 

Malakhai and his family. 

We finished Chapter one in our Go Math books and moved onto Chapter two. To begin our chapter we played a game with numbers. Here is Jackson beating his partner Mrs. Ketchum. :)

I won!!!

Practicing our name can happen even on the playground. :)

Our class put on the Hayride during the Fall Festival. We had an amazing time. Thanks to the PTO for doing such a marvelous job setting this even up for the school. Did you know that every dollar we earned at teh Fall Festival will directly back into our classroom? 

Even our school mascot rode the Hayride with us. 

Bree riding the hayride. 

Lilly on the hayride.

Apples and Reading Stamina

Alright, I am two weeks behind but they have been two wonderful but very busy  weeks. We met our reading stamina goal and grew our brains by leaps and bounds. This means that the entire class was able to read for 15 minutes. Reading at the beginning of the year in Kindergarten does not always mean reading the words. We begin by reading the pictures and predicting what we think the book is about. We also look for our letters of the week and punctuation marks. We also began our literacy Daily Five block. This is also the time that Ms. Ferguson and myself will pull reading groups. 

Yellow Day picture

Using our classroom tablets during Daily 5

Using our laptops during Daily 5

TAG Readers in use during Daily 5

Going Home :)

Last week we had fun learning all about apples and Johnny Appleseed. On Friday to finish all of our learning we made applesauce and tasted several different kinds of apples to see which one our class liked the best. 

Cutting apples to make apple sauce

Ms. Ferguson leading the apple cutting

More apple cutting

We like the Gala "pink" apples the best!

Our apple sauce was delicious. Here is how we made it. We cut Gala apples into tiny pieces and put them in the crock pot with "real" apple juice and cinnamon (you could use water and sugar instead). We cooked them from 9:00 am until 2:00 pm on low in the crock pot. They smelled so delicious!

Building our stamina

We began building our stamina to reading this week. We discussed how when we build our stamina we build our brains. We learned how to read the pictures of a book along with the words.  

Reading

We also learned all about the African penguin and how they are endangered from over fishing, oil spills and garbage that we throw in the water. We decided we would earn money to adopt a penguin from Africa. The way we will adopt one is to work for our parents for spare change and to donate some of our Fall Festival money that we earn. We also had a group of 4th graders come and teach us about other endangered animals around the world. 

Keeping track of how much money we are earning. 

Our class did so wonderful in enrichment classes earning eagle feathers that we filled up our warm fuzzy jar. Because we filled up our jar we got an afternoon on free time.

Fun times building

Art time

Dress up fun