Tower Power!

This year we will be learning all about engineers.  As engineers we will be solving problems from all over the world with our friends, India and Jacob.  India and Jacob are the children in our science curriculum, Engineering Adventures.  They taught us that engineers are problem solvers, "they're people who design things that make our lives better, easier, and more fun."  Our first engineering challenge was to create a tower.  The tower had to be 10 inches tall to protect our frog from the alligators below.

Signs of Fall

Every morning during calendar time we check Wonderopolis for the Wonder of the Day.  With it being the first day of fall we found a past wonder, Why do leaves change color in autumn?  We watched a time lapse video and discussed what we observed.  Later in the afternoon we went on an expedition searching for signs of fall.  We discovered many of our trees at school were already changing colors.  The leaves we observed were red, yellow, orange, green, brown, and even purple.  One of the trees looked like it had already lost all of its leaves however, there were no leaves on the ground.  Some friends suggested maybe that tree is just "bald." :)  Once we finished our observations and collected many signs of fall we brought our findings back to the classroom and created projects.  One of the fall changes we discussed was the change in weather.  For now we are enjoying the nice warm weather, hoping it stays around for a few more weeks!  

Happy Fall!!!

               

First Days

The first days of school were a blur!  We had so much to learn and so many new people to meet.  We went to stations around the school and learned about our bee expectations at each one.  We know to bee respectful, bee responsible, and bee safe everywhere in our school.  We also discovered a new friend named the quiet fox.  We made quiet fox headbands and know that if a friend is being noisy, instead of telling them to be quiet and being loud ourselves we can show them our quiet fox.  After our staggered start days we got to know all of our new friends, we have 23 friends this year!  Here are some pictures of us exploring the classroom and our iPads.

It's time to get our learn on!

"It's time to get our learn on!"  Kid President

Welcome to the 2014-15 school year!  We have a lot going on in kindergarten this year and I cannot wait to meet each and every one of you!  This year at Lincoln Elementary each child will have a device to use.  In our classroom each child will have an iPad to use every day.  With the new technology we will also be focusing on personalized learning in our classroom.  This means that each child will be involved in guiding their own learning.  We will be setting goals and working to achieve them throughout the year.   On our classroom blog you will find information about what is going on in our classroom throughout the school year.  We will be learning all about blogs and soon the children will be blogging with their third grade buddies. 

Thank you for checking out our blog, I am looking forward to working together with all of you this year!

"Together we can make the world awesome!"  Kid President

Kindergarten 2013 2014

It has been an amazing year!  I cannot believe how fast time flies!  I hope everyone has a fantastic summer preparing to be first graders next year!  Here is our end of the year video celebrating our many achievements and events throughout the kindergarten year.

Happy Mother's Day

We love our mom's and everything they do for us!  Happy Mother's Day!!!

Tech Time

We have not been posting on our blog recently because we discovered a new site, kidblog.org.  As much as I love Blogger our kiddos cannot use Google+ so they cannot post on the blog without logging in as me.  The neat thing we discovered on Kidblog is that we can each have our own login and post to the same site.  The kids have been writing their own posts during computer lab, writing centers, and during Tech Time.  While we have been gone from blogging we started Tech Time each Wednesday!  During this time each one of us has our own iPad and we are learning many different things.  We learned how to get onto our e-mail using the iPad, how to e-mail each other, how to get to our Google drive, and started blogging.

Discovery Center Field Trip

We spent the day at the Discover Center in Rockford, Illinois.  Discovery Center Field Trip

President's Day

On Monday, February 17th we celebrated President's Day.  We learned that Barrack Obama is the 44th President of the United States of America.  We also learned that our school, Lincoln Elementary, is named after a President!  That President was the 16th President, Abraham Lincoln.  On Monday afternoon we got together with our other kindergarten friends and made Abraham Lincoln masks.

Valentine's Day 2014

On Friday we celebrated Valentine's Day in our classroom.  We made a Valentine's Day candy graph, made a Love Bug using Valentine's Day words, and made a Love Bug crown!  In the afternoon we passed out our Valentine's and enjoyed a Valentine's day snack of read juice and cupcakes.  Valentine's Day 2014

100th Day of School!

We are 100 days smarter today as we celebrated the 100th Day of school!!!  On Monday, during Friendship Club, we practiced counting to 100 by doing 10 sets of 10 separate exercises.  We started today off by making crowns and counting to 100.  From there the day was full of activities involving 100.  We found out that some friends would love 100 pizzas while other friends are really glad they do not have 100 brothers :)

Check out our video of the days activities:  100th Day of school

The Olympics

We are very excited about the start of the Winter Olympics!  This week we joined Mr. Marc in Adventure to Fitness on an original Greek Olympic adventure.  We learned that the Olympics are held every 4 years.  We also learned the importance of being honest and always being a good sport.







In our new Olympic Center we can follow the Sochi Winter Games.  We learned how to scan QR codes with our iPads so we can follow our favorite countries.  Each morning we are using tallies to count the number of medals for 5 countries.  We chose to follow, the United States of America, Canada, Mexico, China, and Korea.  We add the tallies to our bulletin board and at the end of the games we will see who had the most!  In the Olympic Center we can also read books, color pictures, and make our own Olympic stories.

One of our questions when talking about the Olympians was how do they get to the Olympics?  Mrs.  Wenzel helped us answer that question by teaching us about training.  We found out that practicing for the Olympics is called training.  We began our training in 4 events so far; speed skating, cross-country skiing, bobsleigh, skeleton, and the luge!

Today during choice time these friends found the word U.S.A. in an old big book in the room!

Dental Health Month

February is National Children's Dental Health Month!  This month we are learning about health careers and focusing on dental care.  We have learned the importance of not only brushing our teeth but making sure we are flossing too.  As we started to talk about Dental Health we noticed a lot of our friends are missing some teeth. . .

Blogger of the Week: Iris

Miy name is Iris.  This week we red now (new) books.  We lrnd ubout the Olimpik rings.

Blogger of the Week:Jaxyn

My name is Jaxyn.
We lrnd ubout Mrtin Luthr King Junr.
"He was a great leader." - Jaxyn

Blogger of the Week: Janessa

MY name is Janessa.  we lnrdu the wurd look.

Blogger of the Week, Jose G.

My name is Jose G.      This  weec  it  was cold.

January Character Assembly

Today we got a visit from our character bugs to learn a new character word for this month, POISE.  The bugs taught us that POISE means being yourself.  We got to work with our third grade buddies and make wordles.  We came up with positive characteristics about ourselves and our buddies.  I was very proud to see many of our kindergartners helping their buddies to sound out words!  Congratulations to Carlos and Antonio for being HONEST throughout December and earning their bee wings!

Our January Bee Wing Winners!!!

Kindergarten and First Grade Musical

We were very proud of our kiddos during the Kindergarten Musical on Wednesday, December 18.  The kids worked really hard with our music teacher, Mrs. Difazzio, to put together an awesome performance.  It was a lot of work for our kindergartners to put on a show in the morning and in the afternoon!  Here are some pictures from the day!

 All Dressed Up!

                       Playing with our scarfs :)

    Some of our families came to visit!

                                                                                                                           

Holiday Party

The day before Winter Break was our Kindergarten Holiday Party and Family Movie.  Unfortunately this year the weather was extremely icy and we had a two hour delay.  This left us with a very small class for our celebration.  We missed all of our friends but had a great time!!!  We made snacks(and nibbled on the ingredients), unwrapped presents, wore our comfy pajamas, and spent the afternoon eating popcorn and watching The Grinch with our families.  Here is our video we put together together throughout the day:  Holiday Party

January 3, 2014

My name is Emilio.  we  had  2 das this week.  We went  too the cumputr lab.

Gingerbread Hunt

We tested our baking skills in December by making Gingerbread People.  We got together with all of our kindergarten friends and created our own gingerbread people after reading the story, The Gingerbread Man.  We went back to the classrooms and read another version of the story called, The Gingerbread Cowboy while we waited for the cookies to bake.  When we went back to the oven the gingerbread cookies had disappeared just like in the story!!!  Some of our friends pointed out that they had originally thought the story was fiction but it turns out it was non-fiction!  The gingerbread men sent us clues and we searched for them all over the school, they were really fast.  Finally those sneaky gingerbread men ran into our third grade buddies who captured them for us!  We shared our cookies with our buddies to thank them.  Check out our adventere here,  Gingerbread Hunt