Sunday, March 22, 2015

The Luck of the Kindergarteners!

Spring break has come and gone!!!  We started out the our spring break with our annual Teddybear Heart Walk and Health Fair.  We started this walk in memory of a teacher from our school who was very involved in PTA and anything else we needed her help with.  A truly wonderful person to have known.  Anyone who knows Sandra and myself knows how involved in PTA we are, this is one of the free community events held at our school.  I (Cindy) along with a small committee made of our awesome P.E. teacher and our amazing nurse put it together.  We always have the support of our coworkers, administrators and parent volunteers at this event.  Best of all we get to bring our fur babies too! That's always a treat for our kids!  Here's Tink with a couple of my little friends.
After a long and restful week, I know we're not alone in saying that the first week back from spring break almost feels like the first week of school!  So much excitement+lots of things to do=two super tired teachers! But through all of this exhaustion…we still had a SUPER fun week!  We started out by asking our little ones about what they did during spring break.  These are the two ways we did this during our morning morning message.
Since Tuesday was St. Patrick’s Day we decided to use this week to learn about leprechauns and rainbows.  Here’s a cute little hat the kids made to wear using a coloring page run on green cardstock.  We added glitter to the little buckle, because glitter makes everything better, at least that’s what one of our favorite kinder bloggers Greg Smedley says.  We totally agree!  Here’s a cute little leprechaun peeking through the door.  As well as Sandra and myself in our festive hats.  She got her's on her trip to Ireland!  I think its awesome and hilarious!  She pulled it off.
During writing we once again asked our students to write about, "What is more precious than gold for you?"  I used the same craftivity from last year by The Teacher Wife combined with the leprechaun from "Leapin' Leprechaun" by A Cupcake for Teacher.  I changed the legs by using scrapbook paper.
Sandra used a leprechaun from the Deanna Jump Math and Literacy Fun unit.  I love the little round hats! So cute!
Next was my favorite activity of the week.  I love doing directed drawing!!!  This is a freebie that I saw on Facebook by First Grade Blue Skies!  It was so easy and came out so stinking cute!
I changed it up a little and let the girls choose if they wanted a beard or not lol!  All of them chose to NOT have one of course.  Also I found a "What is your Leprechaun name?" on Facebook and gave my kids leprechaun names by using their first name and last name initial!  My favorite name was Clover McDoodles!
 Last was what the kids thought was the best activity of the week for them...painting rainbows!!!  They had to draw a rainbow with pencil, trace it with a permanent marker then finally paint it with WATERCOLORS!  This year I used liquid water colors for the first time ever.  Let's just say I feel that I've seriously been missing out.  The kids did great and made some beautiful rainbows of all shapes and sizes.  They had to write about what their favorite color on the rainbow was and name some things that are that color.
That night we went to dinner and to the opening of  Insurgent with some of our teacher friends!  It was a nice break in a busy week!  The movie was good and can we just say...
Finally to cap off our week we had an attendance rally to celebrate the students who came to school everyday on time!  They get to wear a special ribbon and come up to the stage to get recognized in front of all of the other kindergarten classes.  We have 11 classes at our school!  That's me and there's Sandra in the background lol!  When it was over it was time for pre-k dismissal so our P.E. teacher played the Cha-Cha Slide to allow the hallways to clear a little before we headed back to class.  The kids were breaking it down!
Well friends it's time to wrap up this blog and get ready for next week.  It's dino time!  So excited because we love dinosaurs!!!  Wishing you a WONDERFUL week!
-Cindy and Sandra














Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Snow Days & Our Dr. Seuss Celebrations

Hey y’all!! I’m super excited!! Can you believe that we are only THREE days away from Spring Break! Cindy and I are soooo ready for a breakeven though we've had a few days off from work already due to snow days. Those days off just gave us SPRING FEVER!! We've had 3 snow days and if you know Texas you know we can’t drive in snow so the entire state gets shut down lol! I love being at home relaxing and working on stuff for my classroom and Teachers Pay Teachers, but I was ready to get back to my classroom and do all our Dr. Seuss activities. Due to the snow some of our Dr. Seuss stuff was either pushed back or cancelled but we still had an awesome celebration. 

Something new we did this year was a directed draw from First Grade Blue Skies! I love doing directed drawings with my kiddos. I think they turned out super awesome! We hung them up with our Dr. Seuss book critiques.
 We also made green eggs and ham and then our kiddos wrote a “How To” paper on the steps for making it. They did a pretty good job considering they wrote it in English for TELPAS when they usually write in Spanish.
We had to borrow this hot plate and I wanted to send a little shout out to say thank you to my friend Melissa Abilez for saving the day. We might do the deviled eggs next year, less stressful lol.

After tasting our green eggs and ham we graphed whether we liked it or not. I'm not the best cook but as you can see from our graph the kiddos loved my green eggs and ham. They said I was a chef...I almost died laughing because I'm the worst cook.                                       
We also made these really cute hats that we saw on KindergartenSmorgasboard on Instagram. They were really easy and turned out super cute!!
To top this SUPER fun day off we had a R.I.F. today!  On this day our kids get to go to the library and choose a book to take home which is an awesome gift for them! Our wonderful PTA buys the books to give to our students and our librarian coordinates it.  They were so excited to get to pick a book and take it home.  One little friend decided to take his Lorax mustache to the library so "no one will know who I am" or so he said.  Oh, kindergarteners are so stinking adorable!!!  He stayed in character the whole time! lol

We just found out we have another snow day tomorrow!!! Happy Dance!!
               
We're outta here!! Off to sit by the fire and watch T.V. Stay warm and keep blogging!!
Cindy & Sandra