Another wonderful week in Kinderland!

Happy weekend everyone! We had another busy week in the wonderful world of Kindergarten!  There's never a dull moment! This week we participated in some great centers, learned about Palm Sunday and the Stations of the Cross, and ended our week with a great Academic Pep Rally!   Here are some photos from our great week:

 Here are our Palm Leaves, complete with the word Hosanna!  Palm Sunday is one of the holiest days of the Church year, marking the day that Jesus came to town to celebrate Passover with his family and disciples.  I remember enjoying this particular Sunday a lot as a child since I received my own palm leaf to place in my room. Of course, I had to try and fold it into the shape of a cross as I sat nicely in Church, but that's beside the point!  Palm Sunday is the beginning of a very holy week, including Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and, of course, ending with the holiest day of the year, Easter Sunday!  

During Computer class this week, we celebrated the other great part of Easter, the Easter bunny!  We've mentioned that the Easter Bunny enjoys leaving Easter eggs for the children that had a particularly good Lent, especially those children that really tried their best to follow their Lenten promises (what they gave up at the beginning of Lent).  

We had a chance to hang out with our Study Buddies TWICE this week! First during our normal Study Buddy Wednesday, then later during Families! Here is a quick snapshot of us hanging out with our favorite 5th graders:

 

 We've been working hard this week on becoming extremely familiar with our number words.  The kindergartners are now able to recognize and read their number words, one through five, with little or no adult help!  Here are some kiddos participating in a little number activity with our magnetic white boards:

Here is a kiddo showing us the correct answer for one of our number worksheets on the white board.

  

Here are some kiddos working on a number-word addition power point that I created- the class worked on their whiteboards as I called volunteers to the big whiteboard!

Mrs. Schulte stopped by for a little visit yesterday. We impressed her with the amount of sight words we could read with no hesitation!  We practice these sight words practically every single day on a powerpoint presentation, so most of our kiddos feel very confident about recognizing and reading their sight words by now.  They should feel very proud! They are on their way to having a solid reading foundation in First Grade!
 While we're on the topic of a strong reading foundation, speaking as the former 1st Grade teacher of our school, I can tell you that about 95% of our kindergartners leave kindergarten with a good reading foundation.  They can decode (sound out) two, three, and four letter words with confidence.  They know their consonant sounds and vowel sounds, and they can spell confidently with "kinder" spelling (spelling that makes sense but may not be the way the dictionary spells it).  We practice sounding out every day, and I get to observe these skills in centers and during a weekly spelling assignment on Friday's.  Here is a student practicing their sounding out and sentence writing skills in a center:

 
Here is a student practicing their reading skills during centers:

She may look frustrated, but she wasn't! She's a great reader! She was just trying keeping her hair out of her way = )

 Here is a group of students working on their reading skills:

Here are some students looking through their Listening Center story after listening to it one time:

 

We had time during one center to practice reading our number words and placing them with a group of pictures that had the corresponding number of items:

One center was titled, "Word Hunt".  The class was given a graph with some sight words they were "hunting" for in some books.  Every time they found one of the sight words, they either colored in a square on the graph, or they could print the word in the square for some printing practice!

We had a blast prepping our bags with candy for our School Families project! Every year the school makes beautiful Easter baskets for less-fortunate families in our community. Kindergarten is in charge of donating candy for the baskets.  Here we are in our "conga line" filling our bags with candy:

We are currently learning about the water cycle and evaporation in our Science class.  Here is our current Science experiment: will water evaporate faster in an open container or a closed container?  Time will tell!

Here is one of our students explaining the water cycle to the class after a fun art project involving the water cycle:

 
We ended our wonderful week with an Academic Pep Rally (or, as some students mistakenly said, Pepper Rally!) 

Well, that's it for now!  We are not studying a new letter next week- we will be reviewing vowels and learning a little about consonant blends.  

The share topic this week will be anything that begins with a vowel (but not the "sometimes" vowel y)

Kinder Club is happening this Wednesday! 

We are looking for some volunteers to help in Centers on Tuesday afternoon...

Please check your Parent Envelopes for the schedule for this week. Remember, there is noon dismissal on Thursday, and there will not be any daycare available that day. Then it will be time for our Easter Break!

Hope everyone enjoys their weekend!