We are Readers!

Good Afternoon!

Today was the last day of September!  Can you believe we have been in school for a whole month already!  Wow!  Today we introduced our two sight words:  I    am.  Have your child be a reading detective and look for these words in books at home!

Our vocabulary words (called Amazing Words) are positional number words.  We lined up and assigned an amazing word to each person, first-sixth.

We also read our story, The Little School Bus.  We really enjoyed some of the characters in this story, like the fox in socks and the pig in a wig.  Tomorrow we will dive deeper into the characters in this story.

We introduced the four pattern stations that students will investigate this week, but because of library, we were not able to start the stations quite yet.

This afternoon we received our first book that we can read independently!!!  This book combines the words "I am" with color words to make a predictable text for students to read.  We colored the pages in our book to match the words, so that we can use the pictures as clues (like good readers do!)  We are also working on voice print matching, pointing to each word that we read.  These books will be in our book boxes until next week, when students will then be able to bring them home to share!

Happy Birthday Daisy!  We were honored to be a part of your special day today!

Have a great evening!  Keep on recording those minutes for the Read-a-Thon!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Wild Wild West

Good Afternoon,

We had a super fun and exciting day at Somerset!  Today was our Wild Wild West Read-a-Thon Kickoff!!!  We learned about the Read-a-Thon and all of the cool prizes that we can win just by reading!  Please read over your information packet that came home in Friday Folders today.  On Monday, we will be setting a class goal.  At our assembly today, the teacher dance group, The Rockin' Readers performed.  The kids had fun watching Mrs. Huettl dance!

We also finished our final two Mystery Letters today!  Our alphabet is now complete!  We made our Z,z's look like zebras.

We glued pictures of keys onto our letter K,k.

We also met with our 2nd grade buddies and talked about our favorite things to do at home and at school.

This afternoon, Dr. Allen-Mastro, superintendent, came and read us not just one, but two stories!  We were able to add these minutes onto our Read-a-Thon minutes!

Get excited about reading this weekend and start collecting donations for our school!  We couldn't do what we do without you!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Water-Weeds-Wednesday

Good Evening,

From the title of this post, you have probably realized that one of our Mystery Letters today was W,w!!!  We watercolored our letters with water and weeds.

Our other Mystery Letter was the letter V,v.  We added vines to our V,v's.

We continued our work on sorting at snack today by sorting our Chex Mix!  Look at the different attributes we sorted by:

We started Listen to Reading today.  Students enjoyed using the ipods to listen to a book!  More on the benefits of Listen to Reading in another post :)

We started to introduce our options for Word Work that will begin next week.

Students worked on ABC puzzles.

Traced ABC books.

Worked with magnetic letters on cookie sheets.

Made words and letters using wiki sticks.

I hope you had a great evening!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

We are Terrific!

Good Afternoon!

We had a great day here in kindergarten!  This morning we worked on two more mystery letters!  Our alphabet is almost complete!  We started with the letter U,u.  Ask your child to show the gesture we use for the letter U,u sound.  We pretend we are umbrella birds.  We looked at some pictures of umbrella birds as well.  On our papers we added umbrellas and unicorns to our letters.

Our second Mystery Letter of the day was J,j.  We oohed and ahhed over the jewels that we glued onto our papers!

We built up our reading stamina to 7 minutes today!  What a terrific accomplishment!  Tomorrow we will add Listen to Reading in as a choice during our Daily 5 time.  Check back tomorrow to learn more about our Listen to Reading choice.  Here are some friends who were caught doing some great reading!

In math today we talked about a big math word: attributes.  We sorted our classmates using attributes such as hair color and shoe type.

Then we read a story about a boy and his grandmother's button box.  The story talked about all the different ways the boy sorted the buttons.  We returned to our tables and sorted our very own pile of buttons.  Here is how we sorted them:

By shape:

By color:

By number of holes:

By size:

This afternoon we worked a bit in our journals.  We also had computer class with Mrs. Garrett and a kindness lesson with Mr. Tinjum, where we learned about the word empathy.

Have a great evening!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Funday Monday!

Hello!

This week we will wind up our Mystery Letters!  Today we worked on the letter R,r.  We colored our letters red and glued on rocks.

Then we worked on letter P,p.  We colored the letter P,p purple and glued on pom-poms!!!

This morning we worked more on building our stamina to become "super-readers!"  We lost a little bit of ground over the weekend, but after a couple tries, we made it to 5 1/2 minutes!  When we get to 6 minutes of reading stamina we will introduce Listen to Reading, the next component of our Daily 5 literacy activities.

We ventured down to the library today.  Remember, your child must return his/her book from the previous week in order to check out a new book.  Our library day will be Monday for the rest of the school year.

This afternoon we worked more on labeling in our journals.  Some of us labeled our pictures from last week, while others started new pictures to label.

Have a great evening-its gorgeous outside!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Friday Already?

Good Afternoon!

Today was another great day in kindergarten!  We had two Mystery Letters today.  We started by gluing metallic paper onto our letter M,m.

Our second letter was the letter N,n.  We put number stickers onto our letters.

We met with our 2nd grade buddies today!  We watched the story The Rainbow Fish on Storyline Online.  Then we worked together to paint a piece of white paper.  We worked on taking turns, working together, being polite and all those life skills that come with working together for a common goal!

It was fun to take out the watercolor paints and have some fun with our buddies.  Next week we will be turning our colorful paintings into rainbow fish with sparkly scales!  Can't wait!

This afternoon we worked in our journals.  We talked about writers do.  Our first job is to think about an idea.  Then we draw a picture to get our thoughts on paper.  After our drawings, we had the chance to label our pictures!  We remembered that labels give the reader information about a picture-this was our lesson yesterday!  It was great to see labeling put into action!

I hope everyone has a great weekend!  We will see you on Monday!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Work is Fun!

Good Afternoon!

Today was full of hard work, but boy, was it fun!  We even worked during snack this morning, spelling out our names with pretzels:

Again, we are working on two Mystery Letters each day.  Today we talked about B,b and D,d.  For each letter we sing a song, learn a movement that correlates the letter with an animal (today was bear and deer), and of course, decorate our letters!  Our letter B,b was covered with balloons:

For the letter D,d, we each received a page of dot stickers to put onto our papers!

We had SMART time again today.  Many students have expressed their enjoyment for this time of our day!  The learning taking place through the movement and repetition is phenomenal!

In math today we created number posters (pictures to come) with partners.  We will be finishing our number posters tomorrow :)

This afternoon we had a lesson on labeling.  We talked about what labeling is and why we label things.  We talked about how we label our lunch boxes so we know who they belong to.  We talked about how labels help readers learn more about a picture.  We labeled a picture of a teddy bear together.

Then, the fun part!  We labeled Mrs. Huettl!!!

Each of us received two post it notes to walk around and label things in our classroom.  We wrote down the sounds we heard, and if that meant just the beginning sound, that was fantastic!!!

Tomorrow we will start labeling the pictures in our journals!!

Today was so enjoyable:)  Looking forward to a great end to our week tomorrow!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl