Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  Our Kindergarten class has enjoyed some fun New Year's stories.  We read the book Shante Keys and the New Years Peas and talked about New Year's traditions.  We read Squirrel's New Year's Resolutions and talked about what our goals were for the new year.  We also illustrated a book called Snowflake's New Year with our reading buddies.  We are definitley ready for a new year. 

In writing we are almost done with our second quarter weekend journals.  We can't wait for you to see them.  They will come home in a few weeks.  You'll be so amazed at our writing.  We are writing sentences and using spaces, capital letters, word wall words and periods in our writing.  We have been writing about the stories we read in the morning, and this week it's all about snow.  We wrote about snowmen at night, snowmen all year, and sequenced the steps to a snowman melting.  Now we just need some snow! 

In math, we have been working on decomposing numbers.  Basically, that means that we know how to make a number with two different numbers.  We started with a game called Shake and Spill.  We had a small cup with magic beans.  We shook the cup and dumped the beans.  We counted how many were red and how many were white.  Then we knew one way to make our number.  We kept trying to get different combinations to get our target number.  We also made a caterpillar with 7.  We used circles in only two colors to design a creature that shows 7.  We also know how to play Inside/Outside.  We get colored chips and dump them on a picture of star.  When we count how many are inside and outside, we discovered new ways to make the number 9.  We can also break apart a rod of 10 to show many ways to decompose the number 10.  Ordinal numbers are up next so we'll learn about the position words first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and so on. 

Science is about to get VERY exciting.  We got mealworms today!!  We will learn about what they are, what they need to survive, and how their life cycle changes.  They'll live in our classroom for a couple of months!

In Social Studies we are almost done with our geography study. We looked at maps of the world and the United States to find where we live.  We talked about oceans and continents. We learned about landforms and bodies of water, such as hill, mountain, valley, plateau, plain, desert, ocean, lake, and river.  We know that these are natural features of the land, and we know that some of our land contains human features.  We sorted pictures to show we understand the difference between human and natural features. 

See, we've been so busy in Kindergarten.  Mrs. Ramienski's goal for the new year is to update this blog more often, so check back soon!