Kindergarten Room 203

On Wednesday, December 16th at 4:00 p.m. the Kindergarten classes will be performing their own rendition of the Nutcracker.  This is something that you simply won’t want to miss!  Please meet us in the gymnasium promptly at 4:00 to enjoy this special performance!  Please remember, if you child usually rides the bus, you will need to send a note that day letting the office know they he/she will not ride the bus.  We will be celebrating this occasion afterwards with cookies and drinks so if you could do so, please bring cookies or a drink with you for the Kindergarten classes to enjoy.  Also, please dress your children in black clothing that day.  It will help enhance the rest of the props for the performance  Thank you so much for your constant support.

Last week, we had a great time reading, “The Polar Express” written by Chris Van Allsburg. After talking about what it would mean to believe in the holiday spirit, we decided as a class that it means to think of others. With that in mind we made pretend presents for our family and friends. Each of us came up with an idea of what we would want to give someone for the holidays. On Wednesday, we enjoyed a wonderful surprise when we got to climb aboard the Polar Express at Ogden School! First Mrs. Graves (formerly known as Miss H) let us watch part of the movie. As we watched the movie, Mrs. Graves handed out our tickets and sang the “Hot Chocolate” Song while passing out hot chocolate for us to drink! We then got our tickets punched and rode the Polar Express to Ms. Owen’s Second grade class. While we were there, the second graders helped us write down what we wanted for the holidays and gave us our very own bell!!
For pictures of this fun event, check out the link to the right.

MISSING:  Delicious, brown gingerbread man.  Approximately 10 inches tall.  Last seen on Monday on a pan in the cafeteria kitchen baking in the oven.  Please return to room 203.

This past week, we have a had a great time reading, cooking and tracking down the Gingerbread Man.  On Monday, we read the Gingerbread boy and then proceeded to bake our very own Gingerbread Man.  We gave Ms. Rochelle strict instructions not to open the oven in the cafeteria but she could not resist and out the Gingerbread Man ran.  Ever since, he has been leaving us clues all over the school.  As we continued to search for him through out the week, we read other versions of the Gingerbread Man and used our comprehension skills to compare and contrast the stories.  On Thursday we discovered that in Jan Brett’s version, The Gingerbread Baby the main character, Mattie makes a house to catch the Gingerbread man.  After reading this story, the class concluded that we MUST build a house.

Found: 18 happy children, 1 smiling teacher and a 10 inch Gingerbread Man inside his home in room 203

The following is the SIMPLE recipe to make gingerbread that I used with the class.  I did not even cool the dough before I cooked it and it still turned out great! http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1710,155181-252195,00.html

With the winter season right around the corner, this year Room 203 decided to do a science experiment with ice.  We all know that Chicago can get very icy during the cold winter months and after our science project was complete, our Kindergarten class can help eliminate ice from your sidewalk!  As a class, we wanted to find out whether sand or salt would melt ice faster.  First we watched some quick nonfiction movies from discoveryeducation.com to learn more about how ice is formed.  Then, we predicted which would help to turn the ice back into its liquid form.  Each child had a test sample of ice and as sand or salt was added, the children recorded the results.  You will never guess…. salt melts ice!  Enjoy the pictures!

I apologize for not being more timely with some of these pictures that I have recently updated.  Only a few short weeks ago, we studied “Day and Night” in the classroom.  We learned about nocturnal and diurnal animals.  We also read one of my personal favorite stories, The Napping House  by Don and Audrey Wood.  We talked about how the illustrations move from dark to light and the illustrator in this story gave us clues as to what could be coming next! 

At the end of the week, we celebrated by wearing our pajamas to school.  We had a great time playing charades!  We acted out night time and morning activities for our friends to guess. 

Please enjoy the pictures!

This Friday, October 23rd will be pajama day in Kindergarten!  Please allow your child to wear his/her pajamas to school.  They will be allowed to wear slippers or house shoes in the classroom however, do not forget that we have P.E. on Fridays so they will need to have a pair of gym shoes to change into.  We will also be enjoying milk and cookies that day so please send your child with 35 cents to buy either chocolate or white milk.  Pictures to follow

As I am sure you have already heard, bat week was so much fun in room 203!  We started the week out by learning that bats use their ears to see.  On Monday, we went out into the courtyard and played a fun game of “echolocation”.  One child was blindfolded and had to say, “echo” and then the other children called back, “location!”  The child that was blindfolded had to find one of his/her other bat friends.  The children requested this game for the remainder of the week!  We also took the time to become mammologists and we studied the differences between mega bats and micro bats.  We learned that the easiest way to tell them apart was by their noses and ears.

Some of the interesting bat facts that we found out were the following:

Bats eat up to 1,000 insects in one day

Bats are nocturnal

Some bats eat fruit while others eat insects

Baby Bats are called pups

Of course one of room 203’s favorite parts of the entire week was wearing our bat T-shirts.  Unfortunately it rained so we could not go out to the playground and hang upside down but we made the best of it by flying from place to place throughout the day!

Next Monday, October 12th we have no school due to Columbus Day.  Enjoy the three day weekend and we will see you back at Ogden on Tuesday, October 13th!

Last week, we learned about apples!  Although many of the children had opinions as to whether or not they liked apples, we dug deeper to learn the history of apples as well as how apples are formed.  Many of your children will tell you that we learned about how John Chapman, or better known as Jonnie Appleseed, helped to spread apple orchards all over our country.  Did you know that when a seed is planted from an apple the apples that grow on that tree may not be the same?  We learned this week that it is very hard to grow certain apples!  We also learned that an apple starts off as a flower on an apple tree and turns into an apple.  Apples can be stored up to a year before they are actually sold in stores! 

We not only learned interesting facts about apples, but we also had fun working with apples in the classroom.  We predicted the weight of our apples by finding something in the classroom that we thought would weigh the same amount.  We also learned that an apple can be a small red house with no doors and no windows and a star inside!  We cut open our apples to see if this was true!

One of the best parts of apple week was when we made our very own applesauce.  Check the pictures section to find the recipe of our applesauce!