Shiver Me Timbers! It's Talk Like A Pirate Day!

 Ahoy Matey's!

Today my Kindergarten friends came into our classroom being a pirate ship!  We quickly got eye patches and pirate hats and went to work at being a pirate!  I told LOTS of pirate jokes that the kids did not find funny at all.... I found them hilarious though! 

We learned about the letter Gg today in phonics, and then we spent the rest of the day doing pirate things! 

We created pirate maps, sang pirate songs, read pirate stories, did pirate themed learning centers and even watched a little Jake and the Neverland Pirates!

Arrrrrgggghhhh treasure maps turned out great!

We are really working on coloring the whole picture and talking ARRRGHHH time to stay in the lines.  

During learning centers we worked on counting, writing letters, matching uppercase and lowercase letters and sorting letters and numbers. 

For snack,  we even had some pirates booty!

We had the most fun ever today!

Welcome to the 24-25 School Year!

 It's hard to believe that summer is over and it is officially back to school time!  I am SO excited to be teaching kindergarten again at Clark Elementary School. This will be my 19th year teaching.  I spent the first 13 years of my career at Pecatonica Elementary School where I taught art, second grade, first grade and kindergarten, depending on the needs in our building.  Kindergarten has my whole heart!

I know that a new school year can be a little bit scary for young students.  Hopefully seeing some pictures of our classroom with ease some nerves!  It is *almost* finished.  I just have some organizing and small final touches to add! 

Another thing that my help them feel better about starting the school year, is coming to Meet the Teacher Night tomorrow night!  We will meet behind Clark School at 5 and then move into the classroom. Please bring your child's supplies with them as well. 

I am looking forward to a great school year with these kiddos!

THE FLOOR IS LAVA!!!

 

Today the kids came into class and the FLOOR WAS LAVA!!!!  

We had so much fun this morning doing learning centers in the lava!  Students rotated through centers that included playing with toy dinosaurs, making dinosaur and volcano related words with magnetic letters, a drawing station with directed drawings for volcanoes and dinosaurs, cup stacking and pattern blocks.  They had SO. MUCH. FUN!

We had so much fun learning in the lava today! 

Art Fun!

 I recently received a grant from Donor's Choose that replenished some art supplies in our classroom, like tempera paint, liquid watercolors and new paint brushes!  In addition, we also received some oil pastels to share, which was really exciting!  The kiddo's have been working so hard this year so as we are wrapping up units and working hard on end of year assessments, we are also spending some time being creative and creating in our classroom. 

The students had never used oil pastels before so we talked about how to use them and that they are breakable so we need to make sure that we are gentle when we use them.  We then made rainbows on white card stock with the oil pastels.  I love how everyone's rainbows followed the correct color order, but were just a little bit different.  After we used our oil pastels to draw the rainbows and rain drops, we painted them with blue liquid water colors.  They turned out amazing!

Today they wanted to use our new paint brushes so we got out the tempera paint and made these awesome tropical birds!  This project took quite a while as we had to paint the background green and then we had to paint another piece of paper.. then wait for them to dry.  Sometimes the waiting is hardest part for kinder kiddos.  After lunch we used brown oil pastels to make the branch.  We used our paper that we painted to cut out 1 bird and then we used paper a friend painted to cut out a second bird.  The kids did a great job listening and following directions.  They were even great problem solvers when they accidentally cut off a head or a beak.  It was fun to listen to them problem solve with their peers in order to figure out how to fix their mistakes! 

I tried to get some action shots today, but as you can imagine, painting gets pretty crazy pretty quickly!

It is hard to believe that the school  year is coming to an end so quickly!  I am so proud of them and how far they have all come!