What A Week!

We have been very busy having LOTS of fun in KA! We've been traveling all around the world aboard our magical Polar Express train and learning about holiday traditions. This week was extra special, as we also performed our holiday concert with the JK students, and celebrated achieving our class goal with a Polar Express Pajama Party! It was so great to have all of the kindergarten classes together for a special treat :)

One of our stops was England, where gingerbread cookies come from! We read the Jan Brett story The Gingerbread Baby and had fun creating our own gingerbread boys and girls.

We travelled through customs and had our passports stamped.

Making our very own Gingerbread Babies!

We then travelled to Ukraine, and listened to Jan Brett's adaptation of the traditional Ukrainian folk tale, The Mitten. This was one of our favorites!

Our passports are getting pretty full!

The next stop on our journey was Germany, where we learned about the first Christmas trees! We had a great time decorating our own "trees" ;)

We were worn out after all the fun, so it was the perfect time for us to enjoy a movie and popcorn with our KB and KC friends:

The morning after our Polar Express party, a surprise arrived... from the North Pole! It was an envelope full of bells! The Monkeys are pretty sure our class elf, Rudy, had something to do with it ;)

The train rolled on, bringing us to Israel, where we learned about Hanukkah traditions. We learned a dreidel song and game, and practiced ordinal numbers with our play menorah. We also made glittering Stars of David using two triangles made from popsicle sticks.

Back to the U.S.A. we went! We read a story about the history of Kwanzaa and made kinaras using the shapes we studied during our last math unit:

Today, we had some very special guests share with us about the holiday traditions of Mexico! Mariana's family visited our class and we learned SO much about the Three Kings, pinatas, and more. We will learn more about the Three Kings during Spanish next week, and are very excited!

This concludes a very long, but very exciting post. We hope you enjoy, and ask your child about his or her favorite holiday traditions thus far :)

All Aboard!

Yesterday we began our study of holidays around the world. We read The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg, then spent the afternoon turning our dramatic play center into a train station, complete with a train made from cardboard boxes! We will be traveling aboard the Polar Express to learn about holiday traditions and the places they come from. We have even been issued passports and tickets! Stay tuned to hear about all of the fun places we visit. For now, here are some pictures of our hard work and fun in our train station:

We Voted!

In honor of Election Day yesterday, KA cast their votes... for their favorite fruit! We have been learning about the Food Plate and healthy foods, so this was the perfect thing for us to vote on. We chose between apples and bananas, then tallied our votes using our Tally Chant to help us remember: "1, 2, 3, 4, number 5 shuts the door! 6, 7, 8, 9, number 10 draws the line!" Here's a picture of our ballot:

We even got "I Voted!" stickers - the highlight of the event for the Monkeys :)

Wordless Wednesday: Trick or Treat!

Shape Centers and 40th Day

It has been a math-tastic week in KA. We continued our unit on shapes and celebrated the 40th day of school. We worked together to find circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles in our classroom, and further explored these shapes during centers. Some of our activities included making shapes with play dough, working in pairs to trace and identify shapes in sand trays, making shapes using the Geoboard app on our iPads, and shape memory matching.

Thursday was the 40th day of school. The Monkeys love when Zero the Hero visits, but we had a different visitor this week. Mrs. Hall informed us that Zero could not make it, but sent us a note! This is what it said:

I am sorry I could not visit you,
It turns out I have the flu,
I was not sure what to do,
So I sent this book, and Oreos too!
Happy 40th day of School!
Love,
Zero the Hero

We LOVED the treats and book, Little Goblins Ten by Pamela Jane. It went perfectly with our 40th day math activity! We talked about how 40 is 4 groups of 10, and demonstrated this with a Halloween math project. We used Dot Art markers to create 10 black, 10 orange, 10 green, and 10 purple dots. We then decorated our dots to make them look like spiders, pumpkins, monsters, and bats! Lots of us said it was our favorite part of the day :)

During writing, we decided to write a response to Zero. This is what it said:

We missed you Zero! The Monkeys are counting down to the 50th day and can't wait to see you :)