Finger Creatures!

I love holidays in Kindergarten, as it gives me any excuse to go to the dollar store! They always have fun items that I can reuse in many ways in the classroom. The kids love it too, because then it makes reading and learning so much more fun!

We are beginning to read real words ya'll! Sounding out words, blending sounds together and making sense of sentences. To help with tracking their words as they go, I bought these little finger creatures. They get to put them on their finger and point to the words and sounds as they read each page. 

The kids loved it! It really helped them to make sure that their finger was moving across the page and tracking the sounds as they went. 

I hope you are able to find such goodies at your local dollar store too!

ABC Boot Camp

Horray! We have completed our ABC Boot Camp! I love this idea from Kindergarten Smorgasboard (https://thekindergartensmorgasboard.com/). We have worked very hard the last few weeks to learn all of our letters and sounds! This is the first step in building those foundational skills of becoming readers. 

We celebrated with each student getting to make their own letter necklace and letter hat! They loved being able to look through magazines to find words and pictures that have their letter sounds. 

Of course we had to take a goofy picture!

We then gathered the WHOLE SCHOOL, that's right, the WHOLE SCHOOL came out and lined the hallways to cheer on the entire kindergarten grade level as we had a parade of letters down the hall. This was an amazing thing for the kids to experience as it does take us all to teach these wonderful kiddos. Our principal played Dr. Jean's Who Let The Letters Out as we marched through the halls. One kid even asked if we could do it again! I am glad to hear that this gave him the encouragement that he needs to continue on with learning. 

After our parade, we had a small ceremony in the classroom where we talked about what a certificate was and why it was so important. They each got to take one of these home. (Again, go check out Kindergarten Smorgasboard's Teachers Pay Teachers store to purchase his materials)

Johnny Appleseed Day

Happy Johnny Appleseed Day! We are exploring APPLES in all kinds of ways today. We started out our day with listening to the story of Johnny Appleseed to find out who is Johnny Appleseed and why he is important.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AuotNxGoG8

Then, we went on to make super cute hats from Simplykinder.com. The kids love wearing hats!

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/220465344238677321/

While making our hats, we got an amazing surprise from our amazing principal who bought apples for every student in the school!!! Of course, we ate the apples right after the picture. :)

This afternoon, we will be exploring tasting lots of different kinds of apples. Who knew there were soooooo many? I learned a few things myself from tasting all these kinds. I think I may have found a new favorite. After we taste, the students will work on filling out a class graph and answering questions together based on our data. These sheets will go in their science journals. 

To fill out our class graph, each student will get a paper apple (like the ones on the graph) to color and place on the column of their favorite kind that they tasted today. 

Come back tomorrow to check out our adventures in making applesauce!!!!

Don't forget to follow more adventures from the classroom on my facebook page https://www.facebook.com/KinderificKinder/ and twitter @Kinderific_K

Welcome to Kinderific Kinder! My goal is to share with others the positive in the everyday classroom. Let's face it, teaching is hard! I aim to provide my insights, tips, and tricks that I have gained over the last 14 years of teaching. The world of education is a huge village and we should be working together, and not apart from one another and the ones who will benefit the most will be the students. I would love for this mindset to become something that we all strive to create in our own schools and around the world.