50th day and Classroom Wikispace!

The 50th day of school was a huge success! The students enjoyed learning about how much time has changed since the 1950's! Here are some of the things we discovered that have changed from 1950 to now:

Here is us in our 50's apparel:

We started out our day with a bubble blowing contest. They discovered it is pretty hard to blow a bubble.

We met the other kindergarten classes for a sock hop and limbo contest! We listened to a lot of music from the 50's. I was surprised to find that most of the kindergarteners loved music from the 50's! None of them knew Elvis but their ticket out the door for recess was to say, "thank you, thank you very much!" They quickly became an Elvis fan!

In math we wrote our numbers all the way to 50 and played a race to 50 dice game with a partner. We ended our day with coke floats and 50's music! 

The students have been working hard to learn their letters, sounds and sight words so far this year! We have just finished our first unit! We learned the letters R, P, H and C. The word families we have been learning about are an, at, ag, and ad.

I created a site last year to help the kindergarteners with any letters or words that they were struggling with. The students love to use the computers and iPads to learn! The students have used this site with me at school so they are familiar with the layout. If you would like to use this site at home here is the link to our classroom wikispace:

http://mrsfriederich.wikispaces.com/

When you get to the home page it will look like this:

On the left hand side there are tabs of the different pages that I have created. 

If you click on the tab titled letters, it will take you to the page with all of our letters we are learning about. 

If you click on the letters you will find videos and websites that they can use to help them learn about each letter. I have also included a handwriting video for each letter that I made to help the students learn to write their letters. 

There is a sight word page that the students can use to play fun sight word games. I will be adding to this page this year since some of our sight words have changed from last year!

Some other great reading sites the kindergarteners enjoy are:

http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/abc

www.starfall.com

www.abcya.com

http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/starfallphonkinderchat

We had a blast learning all about the 50's on the 50th day of school. These last two weeks we have been learning all about owls! There will be more pictures coming soon!

Fall in Kindergarten!

Last week we learned all about the season Fall!

In math we made spooky fall math stories and had a pretend campfire to tell our stories around. I sent the haunted houses and ghost, goblins and pumpkins home so your family could tell spooky math stories and practice our math facts :)

In writing we made a class book about what we like to do in the fall. Then the students recorded their voices into a QR code and the students can read the book in the library. While they read they can scan the code with the iPad and hear each kindergartener tell their own story!

We enjoyed going on a fall walk to find different signs that fall is here. Here are some of the reasons the kids knew that it is fall. The kindergarteners took all of the pictures with the iPads!

Leaves are on the ground. 

The trees have no leaves. 

The Spirit Lake football players are playing on Friday nights. 

The trees are all different colors.

We love to throw leaves in the fall. 

Pumpkins are ready to be carved. 

This week we have been learning about spiders. The kids created their own spider and wrote one fact they have learned about spiders. 

After learning about how spiders spin their webs, we made our own giant spider web!

Charles came from the Nature Center to teach us all about spiders and their environments!

Oh yes and one more very exciting thing happened! We got our second postcard from our postcard exchange! We are doing a postcard exchange with the 50 states in the United States. We will send out 50 postcards one to each state and then we will receive a postcard from every state. So far we have gotten a postcard from New York and Oregon! The kids were very excited and cannot wait to learn about the next state!