Lucky Leprechaun Scavenger Hunt

Since St. Patrick's day falls on Sunday this year, we celebrated the holiday at school today. To start off the day we had some amazing Irish dancers come to showcase their talents. The children were amazed at how well they could dance. The best part was when they had volunteers from the audience participate. Several children and our very own Miss Amanda were brave enough to get up on stage!

In the classroom, we made a leprechaun trap! The kids decorated the box with tons of green items. They made gold coins to go inside to attract the leprechaun.

While the kids were outside playing, the leprechaun visited the classroom. He left clues around the classroom that the students followed to find the treasure he left behind. They loved searching for each clue and reading the riddle to see where the next one would be! The scavenger is a must do again! I will upload the clues shortly so you can use them if you're interested.

Memorable Moment

Every day we send home Daily Activity Reports with each child. These reports tell the parents what we did in each subject area and the curricular goal that was to be achieved by each activity. This sounds like a lot of writing, but we just make one for each day and make copies for every student!

In addition we also write a memorable moment for each child. Unlike the rest of the report this is tailored individually to each child. In Kindergarten, we like to ask the children what their favorite learning center was every day. This process can be quite time consuming (we all know there is not enough time in the day) so I developed a more efficient method!

I created an area on the side of shelf entitled, "My favorite center was...". Below the title are six buckets. The first five are labeled 1-5 and the final one says names. Each child decorated a craft stick and I wrote their name in nice black letters. Now they can each take their stick and place it in the bucket that was their favorite center! This has made my life so much easier, and it looks cute too!

Dr. Seuss

In honor if Dr. Seuss's birthday we spent a whole week learning about this amazing author. We gathered up all of the books we could find and read them throughout the week. The books were also available for the children to read on their own. The students had a blast creating their own crazy worlds, just like Dr. Seuss did!

On Monday, our amazing director of education came to school dressed as none other than, The Cat in the Hat! She went around to each classroom and read to the children! They loved it! It truly made the story come to life!

Healthy Heart!

February is heart awareness month, so we ended the month learning all about how to keep our hearts healthy. The students learned that we can keep our hearts healthy by eating healthy food, exercising, and staying away from smoke.

They also learned how important the heart is to the body. We discussed how the heart helps blood and oxygen move throughout our bodies. One of our wonderful parents, Dr.Todd, came in to explain about the parts of the heart and how it all works! She did a fabulous job- especially answering all of our questions! Dr. Todd also brought in stethoscopes to donate to the class so the students can listen to their own hearts. We are very thankful!

We read several books to help us understand how the heart works:

The Magic School Bus has a Heart by Anne Capeci

The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body by Joanna Cole

A Heart Pumping Adventure by Dr. Heather Manley

Presidents Day

I know this post is a little late- but better late than never! In honor of Presidents' Day we did some really fun activities. We learned about Lincoln, Washington, and Teddy Roosevelt. We also learned about Mt Rushmore and how it was made. The students helped color a life size drawing of Abe Lincoln! Boy was he tall! Some of the awesome projects we made were George Washington pictures using cotton balls, American Flags, and a delicious snack: George Washington Cherry Pies! Check em out:

Love Day!

We had so much fun celebrating Valentine's day with the kinders! We did tons of fun activities including: candy heart math, love note mad libs, conversation heart sentences, and my favorite- crystal hearts!

I found a wonderful post on Pinterest about making crystals using two simple ingredients- borax and boiling water. I was a little skeptical about whether or not this would work, but it worked wonderfully!

Each of the students shaped a pipe cleaner into a heart. Then the tied a string to their pipe cleaner and the other end to a Popsicle stick. In a large cup we mixes the solution of borax and boiling water. We used 3 TBS borax per cup of water. When the solution was mixed we places their hanging shapes into the cups. This is the best part- they only had to sit for one day! The next day the students ( and myself) were surprised at how many crystals had formed on their pipe cleaners! Our cups were not quite big enough to put the entire pipe cleaner into the solution, so each one is only partially covered with crystals.

Take a look out how they turned out!

Sugar Rush

Today we learned about junk food and how unhealthy it is for you. We decided to check out our own lunches to see how much sugar is in our junk food. I was very surprised to see some of the results.
We used the measurement that
4g=1 tsp.

Graham cracker- 1 g
Poptart crisps - 5 g
Watermelon - 9.5 g
Fruit by the foot- 10 g
Fruit snacks - 11 g
Marshmallows - 16 g
Lunchable - 17 g
Yogurt raisins - 18 g
100% juice - 22 g