Kindergarten Friendship Feast

All of the Kindergarten students get together in the classroom each year at Thanksgiving to enjoy a Friendship Fruit Salad and sing songs! What fun!

Investigating With Corn

When discussing Native Americans and Pilgrims, we studied corn and the different properties of it.

Adding our thoughts onto our graphic organizer

Using our five senses to learn more about different types of corn

Will it sink or float????

Our recording sheet

50's Day

What fun we had! We watched clips of TV shows and commercials from the 50's, watched some of the bands and sock hops from the 50's, learned some of the dance moves, and EVEN had a sock hop in the hallway! Not to mention, we counted to 50 by 1's, 5's and 10's and we rotated through "50" math stations!


Practicing dances from the 50's before our sock hop!

October=BUSY!

October has been an extremely BUSY month! A lot has been going on in Kindergarten! We have been watching the many changes that are occurring around us! The weather has been nice and cool for the most part, the leaves are changing colors and falling, and the days are getting shorter!
We had Red Ribbon Week at Silverlake Elementary October 25-29th! What fun that was!




We also enjoyed exploring and learning more about pumpkins and the pumpkin life cycle! The students brought in different types of gourdes and we even made a pumpkin/gourde patch in our classroom. We did many different things with one of our large pumpkins. We measured the circumference, weighted it, estimated and checked the number of ribs it had, and estimated and checked the number of seeds in it. The last part was a little gooey! :)

Counting out the seeds by fives Our end result

Alphabet Action

Enjoying one of our FAVORITE letter sound songs!

Constitution Day

Friday, September 17th, was Constitution Day! We learned many things about the Constitution including what it is for, who helped write it, and when and where it happened. A simple PowerPoint presentation was used to teach this along with a book, We The Kids. We also looked at photographs of the Constitution at http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters.html. We worked together to make our own Playground Constitution with rules we should follow on the playground. Each student worked hard to follow directions to create a TLC quilt square. We put them all together and created our Playground Constitution Quilt complete with our rules and each student's signature.

We can taste!

We have been exploring the five senses in Kindergarten this week. Today we learned about our taste buds! We had a taste test with many different things and determined where we taste them on our tongues.

Enjoying the yummy food!














We drew pictures of the items we tasted on our tongues. This helps us to remember which taste buds help us taste different things.






We also have been learning about sorting in our classroom! We sorted yummy M&Ms by color, Chex mix by shape, and we will be sorting construction paper by size and color!



Recording our work!

Well On Our Way....

Well..... we are almost finished with the third week of school! A lot of things have been going on! Last week, we had our Meet the Teacher Night when parents get to come meet the teacher, view the classroom, and hear about the Kindergarten curriculum. There were a lot of parents that came! :) I enjoyed talking with all of them and learning more about their children!



Here is a small favor I had for each parent. Of course it had to be a butterfly! Brilliant Butterflies!






We finished up our Color days today. Today was Favorite Color day. We all dressed in our favorite color, had yummy grapes for snack (Lane's favorite color snack), and made a class book about our favorite color. All of the Kindergarten teachers dressed up in our favorite color!



Mrs. Jordon and I in our favorite colors










We are still getting to know each other in our classrooms. Parents were sent home a note asking if they could write me a letter to tell me more about their child. This will help give me insight on the students personality and get a chance to work even closer with parents.

In our classroom, we are still having King and Queen of the Day. Each student has brought items from home in a paper bag to help tell us more about him/her. Every day we have one person share with us his/her items and the students get a chance to "interview" the student. This gives us a chance to learn more about each other, learn names, and also add names to our word wall!

We are well on our way to an awesome year!

Start to a NEW year

It is hard to believe that a new school year has started! I have to remind myself every year how much my little precious ones have to learn.... Our first week has been packed full of so many things for them! We have been working on getting to know our school and learning the routines and rules of Kindergarten. We also started our color days on Wednesday too. Each day, we study a different color. We sing a song to help us learn how to spell the color word, we make a list of things that are that color, we read stories and poems about the color, and we even have a snack for each color! The best part..... we all wear the color too!

I can't wait to see what the year has in store for us!

Writer's Celebration

We had a Writer's Celebration in our classroom this month to show off our great writing skills! We worked so hard on a piece of writing and were able to share it with our friends and family. We began our piece of writing using a simple graphic organizer to plan elements of our story we were going to write including the setting, characters, problem and solution. We worked on our drafts and then learned how to revise and edit them. The students met with their "editor" (ME!), and worked REALLY hard in the computer lab to type their story. After their books were typed, printed, and bound, the students illustrated their pieces using markers. After three weeks of hard work, we had our celebration complete with cookie and lemonade.

Butterflies

At the end of April-beginning of May, we studied butterflies in our classroom. How fitting for our class, Mrs. Bonner's Brilliant Butterflies! Our school has an AWESOME butterfly garden where we searched high and low for eggs, chrysalises, and caterpillars. We were unsuccessful in finding any this year (I am sure due to the COLD weather this Winter), but had a great time doing it! It was amazing to see that the students knew what to look for from all of the facts we had been learning!













We did find some evidence of munching.......



















It is a good thing that I ordered Painted Lady butterflies in the mail from InsectLore http://www.insectlore.com/. They came in a container filled with food. They are very easy to deal with! You leave the five caterpillars in the container as they eat and build their chrysalises. Once this has occurred, you simply pin the paper insert with the chrysalises attached into your butterfly habitat and wait.... Very EASY! Our butterflies came out in 8 days. We took a vote and named them different silly names, but Brilliant was one of them!

TAKS Rally and Time

Last week was an interesting week! We learned about many different things including time. We read many different pieces of literature including The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle and What Time Is It, Mr. Crocodile? We made our own watches, practiced with Judy clocks, and even sang along with various songs including traditional ones such as Hickory Dickory Dock. We even made a human clock using each other as the hands on the clock!

2:00

8:00

We also had a TAKS Rally parade on Friday to get the 3rd and 4th Graders pumped up for the TAKS test this week.

Strawberries

Froberg Farms is a fabulous farmer's market located in Alvin, Texas. One of the things that children and families can do is pick strawberries. I brought strawberries to school to share with my students after my neighbor had too many to eat of her own! We used FactMonster www.factmonster.com and Google images to find out information about picking strawberries before enjoying them for snack!

Your

Here is another great video of my kiddos singing one of their sight words songs for the week! This is now one of our favorites.....your!

Eggs, Eggs, and MORE Eggs

With Easter on its way, we did a week long study on oviparous animals. These are animals that hatch from eggs. We learned about animals we knew hatched from eggs such as chickens, ducks, and snakes. We also discovered that turtles, sharks, and frogs hatch from eggs too! To carry the egg theme throughout, we also used eggs to experiment and learn with measurement. The students worked in groups with hard-boiled eggs finding its weight and area.



We also worked in small groups with plastic eggs. Each group had 5 eggs with different objects inside. The students used unifix cubes and a balance scale to see how many cubes each egg weighed. After recording the number for each egg on the recording sheet, the students were allowed to open the eggs to reveal the objects inside.



It was an "EGGS"tremely fun time!

Kindergarten Rodeo 2010

We had a lot of fun at our Kindergarten Rodeo! We had events in the morning including Steer Roping, Barrel Racing, Buddy Pick-Up, Face Painting, and even Gold Mining! We had a visit from a REAL cowboy with animals, and we ended the day with square dancing and cowboy snacks! Perfect day in the life of a Kindergartener the day before Spring Break!