It's That TIme Again

Hard to believe that it is time for another school year to begin! It seems like school was just out for the summer! As everyone gets prepared for another school year to begin by working in their classrooms, I am awaiting the arrival of my baby girls! My husband and I are expecting identical twin girls, Charlotte and Aubrey, to be born late August. Our little girls are not due until October, but due to the type of identical twins they are, they will be born early.
I will not be there the first day of school to meet my newest Brilliant Butterflies, but I have an excellent replacement until I come back in November. Mrs. Hay comes highly recommended and is excited to begin the year with a new group of kindergarteners. I look forward to getting to know my students when I return to work.
Here's to a great school year!

End of the school year

As another Kindergarten year comes to a close, I am sad to see my babies go, but OH SO proud of the little ones they have become! First grade is going to be a great experience for them because of ALL they have learned over the past year! Come back and visit my little Brilliant Butterflies!

100th day of school

It is the 100th day of school..... something anticipate until the day finally arrives!! We celebrated the day by doing many things! The students decorated a shirt with 100 things and wore it to school. We made 100 day hats, made a book of 100 stamped items (10 per page), and even had 100 Dollar bill with each child's picture in it! We rotated through 100 day stations that included 100 thumbprints, 100 tally mark dice game, made 100 day glasses, played a game filling in a 100 chart, and made 100 day snack with 100 items in it! What fun we had!

Groundhog's Day

February has been a busy month so far! February 2nd was Groundhog's Day. During the week, we learned about shadows, predicted if the groundhog would see his shadow, and learned many facts about groundhogs.

A groundhog we made.....

Just a Learnin'

We have been working hard over the past couple week learning!Here are some of the things we have been learning about:
Ending Sounds
We worked with partners to sort picture cards by the ending sounds. What fun!

We have also been working in our Math Tubs on Numbers #11-15. Those numbers can be tricky! Thank goodness we have fun games to help us learn them!

We also have been working on addition in our sroom! One day, we got to use gummy bears to help us find the answers to our problems. We used double dice to help us make our problems.

Winter in our classroom

Well 2011 has begun! It is hard to believe that another year is over and especially that another school year is almost halfway over! WOW! We are getting back into our routine at school as well as home I am sure! :)During our Winter unit, one of the authors/illustrators that I absolutely LOVE to use is Jan Brett! Her website, http://www.janbrett.com/, is a great resource to teachers and parents! I have used this website for many different things in my classroom. She offers many different printables including character masks, bookmarks, flashcards, etc. My students love the games that are offered on the website as well! Check out!

We used some of the character masks offered on Jan Brett's website to retell the story The Mitten in our classroom!

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!