Goodbye Rangers!

We had such a wonderful year together. On Thursday, we packed up all our Rainforest Room items and gave them to another teacher, but before I could hand all those items over, I had to get one end of the year snapshot with the students in their Ranger hats and Squeezing Tom Tom the Toucan, just like they came in for entrance conferences. It was so fun to see how much they changed throughout this school year! It was a bittersweet day getting rid of everything, but I am so excited for our next year's theme! The kids came up with so many amazing ideas and thank you for all the awesome donations! I have to get really creative this summer to make it all come to life! It's going to be so hard to say goodbye to this creative and fun group on Thursday! Time to make the most of our last two days!

Free photo slideshow created with Smilebox

Creating the Robot Room

As you know, we have decided to convert our Rainforest Room into a Robot Room. This was going to be a quick summer project, but when the kids voted on it, they had all these different ideas and suggestions on how to help out! It was amazing hearing all their suggestions and ideas! So, I went with it! We decided that every Friday we are going to take something from the Rainforest Room and change it into something for a Robot/Space Room. First item up, was making planets. We did this first because we just so happened to be doing a paper mache unit in Art class anyways. 

First up, we blew up 8 round ballons and paper mached them during art class. 

 Next we invited some parents to come help us paint our planets! We were VERY lucky and had 6 parents that volunteered to help us out! Since we had so many, we decided to break into small groups and each group got their own planet. Mrs. Rehder and Mrs. Bush each took one group too, so it worked perfectly! First the groups needed to look up images of their planet to decide which color to paint their planet. 

After their planets were painted, the groups had to research their planet. They could use their books and iPads to find facts about their planets to present to the class. Kids used videos, images, and 3D images to research their facts. 

Then after was done painting, we had to get ready to present! 

They were so excited to show off their planets!

Everyone was ready to present each group came up and showed the class what they learned. It was so adorable seeing how much they learned and how proud they were of their planets! We cannot wait to hang them up and display them for next year's class! 

We even had some of the other kindergarten classes come look at the finished product! They were pretty impressed and so was I! Check out the slideshow to see how everyone worked together to learn facts about the planets!

Name Collection on the iPads

Click to watch the video on Name Collections!

Materials: 

Name Collections Worksheet

White Board

Markers

iPad

Spring has Sprung! Maybe...

Even though the Wendy the Weather lady is telling us a MUCH different tale, we are hoping that her prediction for snow later this week is incorrect! Last week and today we did a lot of our learning outside - calendar, math, and read to self. 

It. Was. Awesome!

We had a lot of fun learning, playing and growing outside! 

Here's to hoping that this nice Spring weather is here to stay!
Check out some fun Spring Projects that we have been working on! 

 Painted Flowers and Flower Writing!

Singing About Coins!

We have been working really hard to recognize our coins, add coin combinations together and do different coin exchanges. Each student brought in a bag of each coin and this is our coin rap to help us remember that when we have certain coin combinations, we can exchange them for a different coin! 

We have quite the group of dancers and singers! We hope you have fun watching our brains grow!

Earth Day 2013

For Earth Day we discussed what we could do to help our Earth. We discussed the process of recycling, using less energy, helping to pick up trash and many more. Typically, I do a lot of teaching outside on Earth Day and we go around wearing our gloves to pick up our school grounds. Unfortunately, our school grounds have a blanket of snow on them, so we will have to help pick up our Earth once Spring really arrives! Which I hope is soon! Luckily it was a sunny day so for most of the day, so we had our lights off and we even went Smart Board free for the day to conserve energy! We also made sure that all our scrap papers made it into the recycling bin. We know what we did was small, but each little thing makes such a difference. Tonight for homework, each child was to go home and talk with their family about one way they could help save the Earth - big or little! Tomorrow morning we will share what we did for the remainder of Earth Day with our class during our morning meeting sharing time! Can't wait to hear all the wonderful ideas that each family came up with! :)