All our Razzle Dazzle Reading at home is not only making us stronger readers, but also won us the opportunity choose the "Razzle Dazzle Lunch of the month" for December. After great discussion and some votes, we selected french bread pizza, grapes, fresh veggies, and ice cream with a cookie on top. Yum!!

December brought many busy days filled with holiday fun. Some of our highlights were making cookies, watching the book buddies' holiday play, molding and painting Kwanzaa beads, making book to book connections between gingerbread stories, and caroling around the school.

You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch! Green shirts, green ice cream, making the Grinch grin with our sharing, green grinchy stations...Friday was grinchfully great.

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These monsters were just too great not to share! After reading monster stories, we graphed our favorite story by placing our own monster next to the book cover. Which one did you choose?

Fruit Feast, Fruit Feast
Yum, yum, yum!
Which fruit is your favorite one?

As we learned about schema (the "backpack" if knowledge we have on a topic) we studied bats. With each book, website, article, or video examined, we found our schema grew. Ask your child to show you with their hands how their schema about bats grew! We created posters to share our thinking and read them on the video below.

On Scarecrow Day we were decked out in our felt vests, patches, face paint, hats, and scarves.  We celebrated fall with scarecrow stations and made a scarecrow snack. Cooperation was used to make a class scarecrow that was taller than all of us! We measured the scarecrow with different materials in our classroom like blocks, books, kids, dominoes, and links.

Imagination, Imagination, What do you see?
I see kindergartners looking at me!

In science, we have been predicting, questioning, and testing our Halloween candy. Water seemed to have provided the most interesting reactions! We have created a "Voice Thread" to share pictures from this experience. "Voice Thread" allows you to make comments about our pictures in a variety of ways such a typing, speaking, calling, and even a webcam. I challenge you to help expand our thinking and make a comment! Click on the link below to get started!
http://voicethread.com/share/1505399/

Last week we were fortunate enough to have Trudy Ludwig, a real author, visit us at Bendix. She taught us all about being kind and stopping bullies. She gave us some tools for our "bully stopping tool kit". The tools we practiced were:
*Saying, "Stop"
*Asking, "Why, why, why?"
*Walking away
*Saying, "So", "Whatever", or "Who cares,"
*changing the subject
Ask your child more about these techniques. Here we are with Trudy!

Last Friday we visited the Annandale fire station. It was a brisk walk...we are lucky to have the station so close to school! We saw the fire fighters in their full gear and were reminded of how to stay safe from fires. We also received a tour of the station and walked through a truck. Ask your child what they learned!

Our Forever Books

This fall we each brought in a special book from home...one that we have read over and over and have loved for many years. We call these books our "Forever Books". These books have shown us how important it is to read, read, read, to become a stronger reader. Here are our "Forever Books":

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Our red, black, and white shone bright on Cardinal Pride Day! After the pepfest, we got our picture taken with the Cardinal. Click "play" below to hear our Cardinal cheer.

Fair Haven Farms

What a fantastic day we had at Fair Haven Farms! Sun and smiles were abound! The yummy fruit and corn maze were favorites of our trip. Check out some highlights below.

Our first writers' workshop unit focused on writing books about something real that has happened to us. We tried our best to get letters, words, and pictures on each page to help tell our story. On Wednesday we held our first of many writing celebrations. We raised our glasses of juice for a toast celebrating the authors we are becoming. Cheers! Here's to the many more book to be written this year!

Bubbles and Watermelon

During our first few weeks together, we enjoyed some outdoor fun with bubbles and watermelon. We have taken advantage of our nice fall weather while we can!

Our days are busy, busy, busy here in kindergarten! In case you missed it, below is the video shown at "Explore Kindergarten Night" last week. It highlights many of our daily routines.

Meet the 2010 Beach Buddies

Welcome to a new crew of Kindergarten Beach Buddies! It is amazing that we have only had 9 days of school...we have come a long way in such a short time. We have enjoyed getting to know one another the past two weeks. Now it is time for YOU meet us all!

Tuesday we took our trip to the public library. What a great day for a walk...much better than the first day we had planned! We heard 2 great stories from Carla, the librarian. She also let us know about the summer reading program at the library. We loved exploring the fiction and nonfiction books our library has to share. We all hope to make some trips back to the library this summer with our families!

These Beach Buddies are amazing readers! Almost every week this year, 100% of our class met their at home Razzle Dazzle Reading goal. Mrs. Reimer thinks we just might hold the record for the most 100% weeks! WOW!!! On Friday we had a Razzle Dazzle pizza party to celebrate our accomplishments! We will be sure to keep up this reading over the summer too! :)

We loved sharing our "three words" video with out families last Wednesday and thought we would now share it with the world! Inspired by Good Morning America's "Your Three Words" segment, here are our "three words" about our kindergarten year.

Check out artsonia for uploaded images of our artwork from our art class with Mrs. Pawelski. You can search by school name or town. Choose kindergarten and click next a few times to get to our class. Our budding artists are looking good!

The kindergartners are "Going Green"! In honor of Earth Day, we celebrated with an "Inventions Party". After collecting recycling at home, we spent Friday morning creating, creating, creating! Check out these amazing inventors....their future looks bright!

During community writing, we created a chart about the settings of stories. We brainstormed a list of places we could go where stories would take place. Next we used Kid Pix to draw our settings.

After reading Freight Train by Donald Crews, we created our own train in the hallway. As we painted our train cars, we used sponges to smear the ends of our cars to create the look of "speed" just like Donald! We added onomatopoeia to remind our viewers of the sounds trains make. Choo Choo! Click Clack, Click Clack! Toot, Toot!

With our study of mental images, we read the book Birds by Kevin Henkes. After reading Birds, we sketched our mental images on sticky notes. Later, we each had a chance to fancy up our mental images by using the tools on artpad.com. The slide show below shares our thinking! I added a link to artpad on the left side of the blog in case these budding artists want to do some more creating at home.

Birds by Kevin Henkes - Our Mental Images on PhotoPeach

Miss Lundgren helped us learn many new penguin facts. Here are some of our favorite ones!

Will you be my Valentine, my Valentine, my Valentine?
Will you be my Valentine, my Valentine today?

The past few weeks we have been reading and writing about bears. Through books and websites we have become bear experts! We started with a chart stating all the things we already know about bears and then shared questions we still had. The video below shows some of the new facts we learned.

Ryder

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If you haven't had a chance to see our giant snow people in the hallway, be sure to check them out! In small groups, we used teamwork to paint our snow people, decorate them with creative "junk" and give our snow people names.

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This week we began our exploration of bears. We have recorded what we already know about bears as well as what we wonder about bears. Our research has begun through books and websites. Tristan's mom shared a neat website out of Ely, MN where there is a live bear, Lily, with a web cam on her 24/7. Lily is supposed to have bear cubs this month! We have watched a bit in school....so far we have just seen her sleeping! If you would like to check out Lily at home you can visit her at http://www.bear.org

Isabella

During readers' workshop we have been comparing and contrasting gingerbread stories. On Monday we made our own cookies! After eating them on Tuesday we made a graph of where we took our first bite - arm, leg, or head! Where would you take your first bite?