First Week in Kindergarten!

The first three days of kindergarten were a blast :) We have enjoyed getting to know all of our new friends! Every day we start our day with math time. The kindergarteners enjoyed practiced writing their numbers on whiteboards. In reading, we learned about our first two letters alive friends Amos the Alligator and Brody the Bear!

In reading we also learned about our first daily five station called read to self! We practiced our stamina for a whole minute of reading to ourselves from our new poetry journal!

We did a great job with our first writers workshop lesson! The kindergarteners came up with some great stories to write about and share!

In the first three days we have read and compared many first day of school books! Two of our favorite books were "The Kissing Hand" and "First Day Jitters". After reading the books we discussed how we felt on the first day of school! Here are our Chester masks we made after reading "The Kissing Hand"!

Another favorite character we learned about this week is Pete the Cat! We read the books "Pete the Cat Rocking in my School Shoes" and "Pete the Cat I Love my White Shoes". We created guided drawing of Pete the Cat and they turned out great! Here are our drawings:

We sang and danced to many get to know you games to learn our friends' names! We also talked about filling our friends' buckets and we have already added several pom poms to our class bucket :)

One of our favorite times of the day is center time! The kindergarteners had a blast meeting and playing with our new friends at centers!

We ended our day with a favorite kindergarten song and dance called The Gummy Bear Song!

We had an amazing first three days of kindergarten! I was so excited to have our whole kindergarten class at school together today! Here are our first day pictures:

Welcome Kindergarteners of 2013/2014!

Welcome to the 2013/2014 school year! I cannot wait to begin another year of kindergarten! Here you will find our classroom blog. In this blog you will find updates, resources, information and pictures of everything that is happening in our  Kindergarten classroom!

It was so great to meet everyone at our open house last week :) We have a lot of fun things planned for this year and I am excited to get the year started!

 Here are just a few of the exciting things we will be doing in our Kindergarten curriculum this year!

Letters Alive: Our alphabet and sight word curriculum was brand new last year! The letters and letter sounds are introduced animals that come alive in 3D for the students to see and hear! A letter a week is introduced with an animal, word family cards and sight words!

Daily Five: The students work on reading and writing in stations that they pick! Their choices include read to self, read to someone, listen to reading, work on writing and word work. The students love the responsibility of picking their station and will be working on skills that are essential to reading!

Discovery: In discovery we have a chance to learn all about science and social studies! We create many hands on projects, take field trips, bring in guest speakers and explore many different topics throughout the year!

CGI Math: Children learn math through story problems that incorporate many different math concepts. The students share their thoughts with their peers and use a variety of different materials and strategies to solve a problem. The collaboration with their classmates helps them to understand the concepts and reason for solving math problems. 

Bucket Fillers: This year in our kindergarten classroom we are learning to be bucket fillers! Bucket fillers are people who show they care by helping others and filling their "buckets". We learn many ways to treat others with respect and kindness through this program :) Here is a great website to find more out about bucket filling: http://www.bucketfillers101.com/index.php

We are very fortunate to have 1 to 1 Ipads/Ipods in our classroom! The students will use the Ipads/Ipods to explore and learn throughout the year! We had many opportunities to incorporate the Ipads/Ipods into our kindergarten curriculum last year and I am excited to find many more opportunities this year! 

It is going to be a fantastic year! I cannot wait to see everyone again tomorrow and Tuesday for the first day of kindergarten! Be on the lookout for more pictures and updates coming soon :)

Happy Mother's Day!!

Hard to believe that there is only two weeks left of school! I have many pictures and highlights to share with you from kindergarten over the past month!

We wanted to wish all of our moms a happy mother's day! We made this video to tell you how much we appreciate everything you do for us! They had so much fun making the video and drawing the portrait of their mom :)





I also wanted to add some of the highlights from our last month in kindergarten!!

Here are some pictures from our rainforest unit that we have been learning about during discovery time!

We had a blast learning about Earth Day!! We learned all about why it is important to keep our Earth clean and recycle. We even had a chance to pick up some of the trash around our school. 

Lately after lunch the kindergarteners come in and say, "Mrs. Friederich can we PLEASE have some extra reading time today!" How could I ever say no to that!! It has been so much fun seeing how much they have grown to love reading over the year! They are becoming such great readers!

We have been learning about being bucket fillers all year long. As the end of the year is approaching fast I decided to have a end of the year bucket filling countdown. Every day that we are being good bucket fillers we will get a flip flop with a fun activity for the next day. They have been working extra hard to be bucket fillers! Here are a few of the activities that we earned last week in the bucket filling countdown! 

Write using pens instead of pencils!

 Enjoy Capri Sun with our snack for the day!

The kindergarteners did such a great job at their concert! Here are some class pictures I took from concert day! Also, the whole concert is uploaded on the homepage of our school website if you want to share it with family or friends!