As we contiue with our community unit; this week we started our sub-theme about transportation. We listened to the song / story called “We All Go Traveling By“. The book is turned into the song on youtube here. We used a story map to illustrate the main idea and details of the story.
At the end of the story the people in the modes of transportation were all heading to school. So we made a connection to the story and talked about how we got to school. We made a graph displaying how each member of our class got to school. The choices were getting to school by walking, truck, four-wheeler, or snowmachine (snowmobile for those of you living in the lower 48).
For writing we wrote about how we get to school each day and used clipart to illustrate our mode of transportation.
Today we celebrated Valentine’s Day due to tomorrow being a teacher inservice. The day started off with us creating valentine boxes out of empty tissue paper boxes. We decorated the boxes with markers and got out our valentine’s and gave them to our friends.
During the handing out of the valentines we also enjoyed cupcakes, cookies, and jello to help our sweet tooth! After the valentines the students partnered up and talked about something they both liked to do and wrote about why they were friends. Students placed their writings (and drawings) on big bulletin board paper hearts.
Today we read the story Valentine Friends in celebration of our upcoming Valentine’s Day party. After we read the story we created a heart shaped web illustrating the main idea and details from the story.
In the story the characters learned how to make construction paper hearts, so we used the directions in the story to make construction paper hearts. On the hearts we wrote about one key detail we learned from the story.
In Kindergarten we’ve been learning about how to subtract. We started off with playing a subtraction game on http://www.starfall.com where students practiced learning how to take away a quantity and solve the equation.
We then read the story “Will You Be My Valentine?” and then created subtraction story problems about getting valentine candy.
We are now learning about communities in our K-1 All-Star Class and this week we started with learning about communities that we live in. We read several stories about City vs. Country including the book, “Country Kid, City Kid”.
We then watched a Sesame Street video about a city kid going to visit his friend in the country. We learned even more about the differences about the city and the country.
We took the details we learned in the story about both the city and the country and we put them into a venn diagram. Then we used the data we put in the venn diagram to decide whether we would prefer living in the country or the city. For our writing we made TLC art and wrote a persuasive piece on why we prefer either the city or the country.
For centers students explored different types of communities in the city or country.
To finished up our celebration of making it to 100 days of school we also read the book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle. We then created a very hungry caterpillar that is 100 circles long. Students were separated into groups and they were given a set of 10 circles that they had to put in numerical order. Then we put the groups of circles in the correct sequence.
Today we celebrated the 100th day of school and what an exciting day it was. We started off by working out to our favorite Count to 100 song “Count to 100 Everyday” by Jack Hartmann.
(Note: This video is set to unlisted, the only way to view this video is through this website or if you have the URL)
[youtube http://youtu.be/Ve_rJ4Cx8Yw]
Afterwards we reviewed our place value that we’ve been working on all year during calendar time by playing Starfall’s Place Value Game. We worked together as a class and counted all the way to 100 by groups of 10’s and by 1’s.
Then we read 100th day interactive book also from Starfall and then we brainstormed things we could count in the classroom that would equal 100. Students partnered up and found many things such as library books and writing paper. Then we talked about things we could count in our homes that would equal 100. We counted out 100 Fruit Loops as part of our snack and made 100 Fruit Loop necklaces.
Finally we finished up the day by making 100 day glasses and eating the left over Fruit Loops. It was a fun and successful day, happy 100th day of school only 82 more left to go!
