Vacation Fun

Happy New Year's Eve!  I hope all of you are having a wonderful vacation with your families.  The week is going by sooo fast!  I can't wait to hear about all of the exciting things you did this week.  Add to the padlet below a picture or two or even just a sentence about something you would like to share about your vacation.  On Monday, each of us will be choosing one special moment to start a seed story.  This padlet can help with our brainstorming when we're all a little tired as we settle back into our routine. :)    

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Comfy, Cozy Day

Comfy, Cozy Day was a nice way to end a busy, excitement-filled week. The children drew themselves in their pajamas first thing Friday morning.  

  Later, they were thrilled to find out they each got their own Polar Express ticket that would be punched by Barry the Conductor.  We enjoyed watching a read aloud of the Polar Express with the other Kindergarten students in the library.  

After, we were very lucky to have Barry the Conductor lead us in a holiday sing-a-long!  To conclude our Polar Express morning, each Kindergartner received their very own silver bell!  

We had a wonderful time today!

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.K.1

Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces in which they tell a reader the topic or the name of the book they are writing about and state an opinion or preference about the topic or book (e.g., My favorite book is...).

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.K.6

With guidance and support from adults, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers.

A time to give thanks during this busy November

We have enjoyed this month of November by thinking about all that we have to be thankful for and we have worked hard to produce neat and thoughtful work.  We sang about fall and giving thanks last week in our Thanksgiving Sing-a-Long.  If you did not have a chance to attend the children's performance or would like to hear the songs again, click here to see the videos Mrs. Carreiro recorded and uploaded to her blog.   The placemats that went home like the one below are precious keepsakes to remember this delightful age and the wonderful memories of Kindergarten.

Thank you for returning the family projects this month!  The disguised turkeys brightened up the room.  I love the creativity!  During writing, we tried to listen for the beginning, middle, and ending sounds as we labeled what our turkeys were disguised as.

Turkeys?  What turkeys?  There are no turkeys here!

The children enjoyed making turkeys out of construction paper and paper bags.  These turkeys were actually glyphs and were unique for each student. 

When the children entered the classroom after team time this morning, they were surprised and excited to be greeted by a visitor!

I didn't make the connection between my turkey and their own turkey glyphs (mine was created for a different purpose) until one boy told me I didn't have enough feathers and another child added, "I know you are definitely not 18!"   So cute and too funny!!

Instead, my turkey was a guest during our classroom feast.  In fact, I got to carve him!  Check out the video below to see what was inside him along with all the fun we had today.  Thank you to Mrs. Kennedy's second grade class for inviting us to watch their performance of a Thanksgiving Reader's Theatre.  It was a special treat and I learned some new facts about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag's first Thanksgiving.
I want to end by saying I am thankful for each child in my class.  All of you make me smile each day and enjoy my job.  I am also thankful for my students' loving families who encourage and inspire a love of learning outside of school.  You are raising some pretty terrific children!   Happy Thanksgiving!  Enjoy this special time with your loved ones!

C is for Connection

 

This is the hand signal students use during read alouds when they have a text-to-self connection they want to share with the class.

   Has your child shared a text-to-self connection with you while reading together?  Keep the praise and encouragement coming!!  The children have been improving their abilities to connect with the text and now LOVE to share their connections! Over the past few weeks, we have been thinking hard to identify how a story relates to our own feelings and experiences.  We thought of times we were wild like Max in Where the Wild Things Are...

    

and times we felt disappointed like The Littlest Pumpkin by R.A. Herman.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of the students' work for this text-to-self connection activity, but some of the ideas they thought of for when they were disappointed were when they couldn't carve a pumpkin, when they couldn't go to their friend's house, and when they couldn't buy a toy they wanted.

Finally, one of our most recent mentor texts for Global Read Aloud tied in perfectly with our current comprehension strategy.  Check out our text-to-self connections for The OK Book in the iMovie below.  The children loved using the iPad app Chatterpix to make their pictures talk!

     

 This book has such an important message for students of all ages.  (Click here to check out the book's impressive book trailer).  I feel it is important for children to see that we adults are just OK at various skills and activities as well and that is okay.  So, parents and teachers, what are you OK at?  Leave your connection in the comments section below! 

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.K.6 With guidance and support from adults, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers. 

 

Veterans Day

Last Friday, my essential question for the students was "What is a Veteran?"  After reading a book about Veterans Day, we learned that veterans are men and women who have served in the armed forces to keep our country safe.  After, we colored in pictures of people so their uniforms were the correct colors for the army, navy, air force, and marines.  We continued our discussion this week by brainstorming what soldiers are and what they do.     I am truly impressed with how thoughtful your children were when thinking about all that soldiers have done to keep us safe and how they have risked their lives so we can have the freedoms we have today.  

  Each child chose one of the sentence starters ("Soldiers are" or "Soldiers can") and finished the sentence with one of the ideas we brainstormed.  We created our own soldiers to display with our sentences.  

 

Yesterday morning, Fuller Meadow students and staff gathered together in the cafeteria to honor veterans with poems and songs.  Our class was asked to place red poppies under the flag as a symbol of honor and respect. 

 Thank you to those who have contributed to our school's Veterans Day padlet.  We have loved reading what families have written and have enjoyed seeing the projects and videos classes have posted.  It's not too late to add something if you would like.  

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  Happy Veterans Day!    

Pumpkins, Pumpkins, Pumpkins!

Pumpkin day last Friday was a HUGE success! The day was filled with many pumpkin activities. Check out the fun we had!
We read to pumpkins in the Reading Patch.

We read and acted out our pumpkin life cycle poem, read our life cycle books, played a life cycle game, and even matched rhyming pumpkins.

The children were very excited for the afternoon when they got to work in partners and travel to four investigation stations that parent volunteers facilitated.

Children counted the number of lines on a pumpkin and remembered to use smart counting strategies...

They also determined if pumpkins sink or float, measured the height of their pumpkins with cubes, and had the opportunity to feel the gooey inside of a pumpkin and count its seeds.

To count all the seeds, Mrs. Brown had the children each grab a handful and put a group of ten seeds in each small cup.  At the end of the day, we arranged the cups of seeds into ten frames so we could practice counting by tens to 100 and then from there counted by hundreds, the leftover tens, and the ones.  The total number of seeds for our pumpkin was 544!!  Thank you to families who shared your seed estimates with the class.  We enjoyed reading the comments during morning meeting.

We finished up our pumpkin unit this week by reviewing what we already knew about pumpkins prior to the start of our unit and what we were hoping to learn.  The boys and girls were surprised with how much they learned about pumpkins.  Congratulate your pumpkin experts on the new knowledge they attained and have been eager to share with staff members in our school.

Yesterday, we finished up our pumpkin unit by comparing them to apples.  We were surprised to see how similar pumpkins and apples are!  Can your child share with you one way apples and pumpkins are the same and one way they are different?

Lastly, we were excited to hear Mrs. Lancaster's father-in-law was happy to bring his award winning giant pumpkin to school for all the students to see today.  The children asked Mr. Lancaster thoughtful questions about growing giant pumpkins, what the patch and seeds of a giant pumpkin look like, and how he transferred the pumpkin from the patch to the trailer.

This is a Dill Atlantic Giant Pumpkin that won 2nd place at the Topsfield Fair.  It weighs 1,954 pounds!
Thank you Mr. Lancaster for coming to Fuller Meadow!

I am impressed with the knowledge your children have gained!  I am sure you have learned a little more about pumpkins these last couple of weeks as well :).

How many seeds in our pumpkin?

We are very excited for Pumpkin Day on Friday when we will see if pumpkins sink or float, measure how tall our pumpkins are, and count the seeds of one of our pumpkins!  Before we count the seeds on Friday, we made predictions or estimates of how many seeds the children think one of our pumpkins has inside.  To help educate the children on how to make a good estimate, I read them the book How many seeds in a pumpkin? by Margaret McNamara.  We learned some important information from the book that helped us make our estimates.  Check out these cool facts we read:

• Each line on the outside of a pumpkin has a row of seeds inside.

• The longer a pumpkin grows on the vine, the darker it is and the more lines it has.

• The largest pumpkin doesn't necessarily mean it has the most seeds!

Check out our estimates!

Moms, dads, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and babysitters, we would love to hear YOUR predictions! In the comment section below, add your name and your prediction of how many seeds in this pumpkin!  

Check back the beginning of next week for pictures of our Pumpkin Investigation Stations and to find out the actual number of seeds!