Penguin-mania!

We are starting an informational writing unit on... Penguins! We will write nonfiction books about them, and we began our research today. We are reading fiction and nonfiction, and made a KWL chart today about what we already know and some questions we have. We are so invested in this and I am way excited to learn more! Check it out...

Week in Review

And now for some photos from our busy week.  It was so busy I didn't get to document it all in photos but here is a review of what we did:

-a field trip into town
-a visit from Saylor the dog
-blindfold experiment that made us feel like pretty awesome scientists
-Open House
-applesauce cooking
-handwriting, letters E, F and D
-literacy: the letter C, and sorting sounds B, M, R, S
-math conferences with the teacher, and lots of practice with patterns and sorting

one of two ships we saw in the harbor

 

 

visit from Saylor!

Open House:

Busy learning, cooking, etc...

Springing towards the end of Kindergarten!

April and May have flown by... is it really almost Memorial Day weekend?  I hope you all have a great long weekend with your families, and to hold you over until Friday I've selected a bunch of photos from the past month of school that I am sure will entertain :

Flying Mountain Hike, 5/8/12

Kids showing our classroom dads the way!

Lunchtime!

At the summit!

Serious picture-taking

View from the top of Flying Mountain

Happy hikers, who just finished the trail

Dorr Museum, COA, 5/23/12

"Hey, bear."

Best part of teaching: when kids teach you something new!

touch tank excitement!

They asked if we could please come back ten times- I said, "Ask your parents!" :)

Sea cucumber!

Celebrating our earth

With Earth Day behind us, we realize that we should celebrate and take care of the earth 365 days a year- not just one day in April.  Our service learning project has been going wonderfully, and the week before vacation we began working on a chapter book we are writing to help other children understand ways we can all take care of our earth.  We brainstormed lots of ideas and so far have a title and a chapter list; we are getting down to the nitty-gritty writing, illustrating and photographing this week.  This is all very exciting!  The title we have come up with is "Kindergarteners Can Help the Earth!"  I won't give any other details away... you'll have to read it when we publish it :)

Today we read one of my favorite stories, The First Feud by Lynn Plourde.  It is a beautifully illustrated fable about Katahdin, the Atlantic Ocean, and how Maine came to look the way it does.  It also teaches a great lesson, and was a big hit; I was happy to see many of us have already read this at home too!

The earth is in our hands.  Check out our creations by the classroom entrance!

Our opinion as a class is that this book is GREAT!

Also, in the coming weeks you will be receiving numerous permission slips for field trips that are contributing to our service learning conservation project (and to just plain old Kindergarten fun)! We have already scheduled a visit to the COA museum on May 23rd, a trip to Seal Harbor beach on June 7th, and two hikes (one to Flying Mountain and one to Beech Mountain) in May.  You will be receiving a notice about the Flying Mountain hike tomorrow, but now you have a heads up.

One more thing: The Conners Concert, grades K-2, will be next week on Thursday, May 3, 2012.  Wow!  Please encourage your child to sing "Oh Mister Sun," "Nature Baby" and "What do you do with a water waster?" if he or she feels so inclined; otherwise, just wait until the concert and I will see you there!



~Mrs. Fournier

We were a little bummed out that our field trip has been postponed due to wet weather, but that didn't stop us from having a great Monday here in Kindergarten.  I was proud that instead of letting the weather stop us from having fun, we ended up learning from it!

Every school day in September, we kept track of the weather.  We read a weather sentence each morning, and the "Weather Kid" chose to complete the sentence with: sunny, partly cloudy, mostly cloudy, rainy or snow.  He or she then filled in our weather graph.

We had fun taking apart the September calendar, and starting October's.

Everyone gets a turn at being the daily "Weather Kid."

Now that it is October, we are looking back on September's weather.  We all got a copy of a blank September weather graph.  I reminded the students of the number of days that were sunny, and they filled in their charts.  We went through each kind of weather and recorded the information we had... We all decided that October should have more sunny days, if possible!

In other news, we had fun today at P.E. and Music, and of course in our classroom.  The kids didn't seem to notice that we only had one recess today instead of three (shhh!) and they did a great job.  We are working on a lovely poem about leaves this week, and pretty soon we will be creating our very own.. stay tuned :)

P.S.  Our village green field trip will now be held next Wednesday, October 12, 2011.  Make your calendars at home, and you know we will keep track of it on ours!

Week in Review

What a fun and busy week we have had in Kindergarten!


Some highlights:

We've talked about our school community and all of the different roles we have at Conners-Emerson.  We decided students' jobs in Kindergarten are to learn and to have fun- seems like we all are so far!

We were so lucky that Kasch brought in a chrysallis to share with us.  He named her "Evening," and everyone has been so excited to watch her turn into a beautiful monarch butterfly.  Today we released her into the sunny world, and believe she is on her way to Mexico as we speak...

We've learned about patterns in math and have realized they are everywhere.  You can look for patterns at home; I bet you will find lots!  We got to try out lots of different math "centers" today, and will slowly be introducing them into our math time over the next few weeks.

We published a class book called "Did you ever see?"  Everyone came up with their own silly rhyme to fill in and illustrate.  What a great group of author/illustrators we have in Kindergarten!

We've now read four letter books with lots of sight words: My Bb Book, My Mm Book, My Rr Book and My Ss Book... next up will be our Nn Books!


I hope everyone has a great weekend... a few reminders:

Next week there is no school for students on 9/30- it is a Professional Day for all teachers.


**If you would like to send your child to school with a water bottle, absolutely feel free!  They can keep them at their seats and stay hydrated- it'll save water fountain time too! **