100's Day!!

Is it seriously possible that 100 glorious school days have passed?  That my precious class is 100 days older and wiser?  100.  ONE HUNDRED.  What a feat!  What an accomplishment!  We just had to celebrate all day!

We made 100's day crowns.  On the crowns they had to stamp 10 groups of 10 items to make 100 stamps.  Most of the kids did awesome with this!!

Cutting our crowns! 

Stamping!!!

Such concentration!!

 The next thing we did was make a 100's day necklace!  Again, the focus was on 10 groups of 10 different colored beads.  This made it easy for the kids to count to 100 by 10's and then we counted them by ones. :)

Stringing our beads! 

Counting our beads!

 In addition to those activities, we read 100's day books, did some fun 100's day activities during gym, and we played Roll to 100 in math!  This was soooo fun!  Each child got a 100's chart.  They had to roll a number cube on the floor and they got to put that number of fruit loops on their board.  We kept rolling until all of the kids got to 100.  Of course, they got to eat their 100 fruit loops in the end. :) They seriously loved this game! :)

Rolling!

My gorgeous and smart little kindergarteners on 100's day! 

Fun Monsters!

I have been wanting to do a fun monster unit for about a year and a half.  I decided, although not the norm for January, I would start the third quarter off with this amazingly fun unit. The kids loved it, and so did I! I didn't get a ton of pictures, but in this post I'd like to give a snapshot of some things we did.  We started off the unit by learning this poem (you can imagine the gusto the kids read with when they got to the "boo" part!):

We read a lot of monster books!  Here were some of our favorites:

I think the kids could have listened to Go Away Big Green Monster by Ed Emberley 4,000 times.  They loved it!  :)

We did an awesome activity called a "List Poem."  We made a list of verbs and adjectives that had to do with monsters.  They did AWESOME with this!

Then they had to choose 5 words and make a poem that began and ended with the word "monster."  

Then we drew and painted our own monsters!!

                       

                                                     

Finally, we attached our list poem to our monster!  They turned out soooooo cute!  The finished product:

               

                           

In math we are learning about addition.  We did do some addition centers this week.  Along with addition we practiced measuring by measuring monsters with non-standard units:

 Counted and wrote the number of monsters hiding in closets:

We rolled and wrote words on our monster. We had to decide if the words were real or silly.  It seems like when we roll with these cubes we get way more silly words than real ones! :)

The last thing that I took pictures of was our Blow Paint Monsters!  The kids had a lot of fun blowing paint around their paper to create monsters.... and then gluing eyes on.  I was a *tiny* bit nervous about how messy this activity would be, but surprisingly it was not messy at all!  The kiddos did great!  They turned out super cute!

Until next time!

Star Lab

What a wonderful week we have had so far at school.  We are definitely back in the groove after our winter break!  I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!  I had a great Christmas and New Years, but am glad to be back as well. :)

Today was a very exciting day...... we went to the Star Lab!  If you don't know, the Star Lab is an inflatable planetarium.  While inside, the lights go out and thousands of stars, mimicking the real ones in the sky, show up and we get to learn fun facts and stories about different constellations that are in our sky.  This is one of the things that the kids absolutely look forward to and LOVE all throughout their elementary years at our school.  It is so precious seeing them in such awe about the stars.  I also want to say a huge thank you to Mrs. Atkinson.  She is in charge of Star Lab and does such a fantastic job instilling excitement and knowledge about the night sky into our little ones. To sum our experience up, I have to share this comment that just made my whole day:  While we were sitting in the Star Lab, with darkness surrounding us and the beautiful stars above, I heard a little boy passionately say, "This is better than my i-pod!"  Yep, the Star Lab is just that good.  ;)

I didn't get any pictures of us inside.... but here are some pics of us listening to the rules and starting to climb in!

Today at recess KWQC TV 6 was here and the kids got to say the "Hello Quad Cities" line!!!  The kids were SO EXCITED!  So, tonight at around 6:28 tune in!

Be looking for a post coming up later this week about our fun monster unit!  Also, I have started a formal unit on addition, and the kids are doing great!