A Few Highlights from Last Week

We graphed our favorite shape and analyzed the data!

We read The Bus for Us by Suzanne Bloom. We worked on retelling the story with a partner. We graphed how we get to school and analyzed the data. We also illustrated the way we wished we could come to school as a story response.

We learned about the Preamble to the Constitution and what it means. The students talked with a partner about what it means and shared our their ideas. We choose what we thought was the 3 most important ideas and wrote about them. We also illustrated what the different phrases meant. We learned about the American flag and what the colors mean. Then we discussed the importance of the Pledge and how to appropriately say it to show we are proud of our country.



Properties

We have been learning about properties and how our 5 senses help us learn about the world around of and the properties of objects. Students brought an object from home and described their objects using the properties of size, shape, color, texture, and mass in groups.

Community Helpers and Shapes

We learned about different community helpers and their jobs. We also learned about school helpers and their jobs. We wrote and illustrated a page for our class book: When I grow up, I want to be a ___.

We learned about two dimensional shapes and their properties. Then as a culminating activity, the students worked in small groups to give each other clues about which shape to draw in their shaving cream. The students described the mystery shape using the properties (sides, vertices, rounds, straight sides, etc).

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and we watched the scholastic video which is the story put to music and the students LOVED it! We did several letter and name activities with the story.

We found the first letter of our name somewhere in our room and then we cut out coconuts and wrote the first letter of our name on them. We put them on our coconut tree we made with Mrs. Guntorius' class.

We also colored and cut our own coconut trees and mounted it on construction paper. We wrote our names and then count and wrote how many letters are in our names. We will make these into a class book.

We also explored a coconut using our five senses! The students loved this, however only a couple liked the way the coconut taste.

Five Senses and Weather

In science this week, we read Parts by Ted Arnold. On Monday we talked about the different parts of his body that were coming "unglued" and we illustrated a picture of our bodies and wrote our names. Then on Tuesday we read the story again and focused on which of his senses were making him aware of his different body parts coming apart. Then the students colored and cut out pictures and glued them on their body pictures to match the sense they would use to experience that object.

We also learned about different types of weather and the seasons. We talked about how the seasons are a cycle because they repeat in the same order every year. We also talked about clothing that is appropriate for each season. We illustrateded appropriate seasonal clothing and labeled the seasons on a paper plate.

First Week of School

I'm super excited about this class and proud of how smoothly the first week of school went! Thank you parents for waiting patiently at dismissal so I could dismiss the students one at a time.

We have started learning our procedures and routines in our classroom. We learned about PAW Pride and how we are to act in the cafeteria, hallways, restrooms, and at recess. We explored with the some of the different math manipulatives we will be using this year.

In science, we learned about our five senses and how they help us learn about the world around us. We used our sense of touch to feel objects in socks and guess what they were. We smelled different scents in baggies and guessed what they were. We tasted pickles, pretzel sticks, and chocolate chips. We learned about where we taste salty, sweet, sour, and bitter on our tongues. We also learned a song about our five senses.

We read The Kissing Hand and made a kissing hand for our parents on the first day. We read Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten and took pictures for our class book  Mrs. Shaw Gets Ready for Kindergarten.

We sang The Wheels on the Bus and then made our own buses and wrote how our buses would go through the town.

We ate Hershey's chocolate bars and then cut out the word he or she from the wrapper and used it graph the number of boys and girls in our class. We also used our graph to figure out how many total students we have in our class.

We created ourselves using a glyph code. We colored our pieces according to what we liked best from the questions we were given. Then we talked to a partner about how our glyphs were the same and different. We learned a lot about each other!

My Family

I am so excited to get to know your child and your family this year. I thought I would start by sharing a little bit about mine. I am married to Joshua and we have two sons together, Logan Elijah and Lucas Elisha. Logan is 4 and Lucas is 1. I have a stepson Justin who is 9. Justin lives in Arlington with his Mom and will be in 4th grade this year. Logan starts preschool this year so I can definitely sympathize with your feelings about your baby going to school. Joshua is a store manager for Walgreens and we met at our church Inglewood Baptist in Grand Prairie where we still attend. We both help with Extended Teaching Care once every five weeks on Sunday mornings and I lead a small group of 7th and 8th grade girls on Wednesday nights. My favorite leisure activities are spending time with my family, serving at church, reading, and shopping. Below I made a digital photo book so you can see pictures of my family. I'm am so excited about the new school year and having your child in my class.

Photo album made with Smilebox