Kindergarten Blog: Our First Full Week of Kindergarten!

It's hard to believe we've been in school for 7 days already! The children have all adapted well to the full-day, though I think their favorite time is recess (who can blame them).

Here is peek into our first days of kindergarten:

We've been working on building our classroom community. On the very first day, the children learned what the school rules were: be safe, be kind, be responsible. They also learned all about warm buzzies (yellow and black pom poms) and how they can earn them. These warm buzzies are placed in our classroom buzzy jar, which is almost full! Ask your child to share with you how they can be safe, kind and responsible in the classroom, bathroom, and on the playground.

We read the book It's Okay to Be Different by Todd Parr. This was a great book to begin talking about diversity and how we may look or act differently on the outside, but on the inside we were all the same. We also discussed the importance of treating others the way you want to be treated. We created an interactive piece where the children helped finish the sentence: It's okay to..... Take a look at what we came up with. We also talked about the differences between a white egg and a brown egg. Even though the eggs look different on the outside, on the inside they are the same, just like us! To finish out this activity, we created self-portraits of ourselves.

We also read the book Chrysanthemum and each time a character said something hurtful to Chrysanthemum's name, the children crumpled a paper heart. As the characters said something nice about her name, the children tried to smooth out the heart, but as you can see, it's difficult to fix a wrinkled heart! This activity was a great way to talk about the importance of using kind words with others.

Part of being safe, kind and responsible in the classroom, we need to do guided discovery of different areas within our classroom including the materials/tools in our classroom. So, this week we have learned what it looks like and sounds like to use scissors, markers, and glue.

We created rainbow name mosaics by tearing pieces of paper to cover each letter in our names. This activity allowed the children to practice using glue (we worked on creating raindrops and not puddles) and work on their fine motor skills.

We also created a graph based on how many letters in our first names and then shared what we noticed. As you can see, the majority of our class has 6 letters in their names!

We also created a class book showing how many letters are in our names. This book will be displayed on our curriculum night for you to look at.

We had read the book Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten on the very first day of school. We had a conversation about how we each got ready for kindergarten. Then, the children drew a picture of how they got ready for kindergarten.

We completed a rhyming activity that had the children creating monsters. The first day, we created a monster as a class. The activity was repeated the following day and this time the children got to create their own monster. Not only did we work on rhyming skills, but this activity also allowed the children to practice being responsible with our brand new markers!