Spooktacular Afternoon!

I I can't believe October has come and gone. We had so much fun incorporating spiders, bats, eyeballs and Halloween anything wherever we could this month! A big thanks to all the parents who sent in things/helped out at the party. The kids had a great time! They all looked fabulous in their costumes...

I think Alexandra should consider being our Dragon Rally mascot because she was the cutest dragon I ever did see!

 A HUGE thank you to Kamani's Nana for making our whole class personalized Halloween cups. So sweet!

I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween night! I'm looking forward to seeing my army guy and women's soccer player before they go trick or treating tonight! Happy Halloween!

MizzouRAH!

My McBride #2, sweet Ansleigh, came to show off her Mizzou pride today! Sure love getting visits from my former students. MizzouRAH!

Sight Words 11/2-11/6

said, does, one, then, was

Brag Tags!

I introduced brag tags today. Any day I find someone showing one of these rad attitudes, they'll get to wear a brag tag for the day! We are excited to start this next week!

Bossy "R" Sisters

Today we learned about r-controlled vowel teams. We brainstormed a list for each. Another trick added to our magic bag! 

Halloween Festivities!

Friday, 10/30:

Parents may start setting up for the party at 2:30 while students are having their costume parade on the second floor. We will be back to start the party at 2:45.

-Centers should be 10-12min.

-Students will be in 5 groups rotating through and then we'll end with a treat and drink. 

-Party must end at 3:45 to be sure students are packed up/room is cleaned up in plenty of time for dismissal. 

-Costumes must go over students uniform as all students will change in the classroom. No masks,makeup or accessories please! 

They are very excited! Thanks for helping us make it a fun day for the Crew!

                        

Post-Pumpkin Patch...

The Kinder Crew was very good at the pumpkin patch and made their dear teacher proud of their behavior! When we got back, we had a shoe-less afternoon (due to the mud!) and I let them get cozied up on the carpet during rest time to watch Magic School Bus: Going Batty where they made so many connections to our bat facts we researched! Not to mention, it was the cutest sight to see!

A big THANK YOU to our chaperones who joined us! 

Be a Bucket Filler!

Today we revisited what it "looks/sounds/feels" like to be a bucket filler. Lots of silly arguments, testing each other's patience, tattle taling etc.this week and end of last. If it's something like "Ms. Gegg so-and-so is talking to so-and-so..." I expect them to walk through our problem solving strategies, if that didn't work then they should come to me and of course if it's something more serious. Please discuss ways to be a bucket filler at home also. Thanks for your support with this! 

Daily 5

Red Ribbon Week!

Oh.my.word! 21 kinders in their pj's?! Too cute! We are working hard on self control today but the full moon and rain has really played a part in our morning! 

< or >

Today we had some fun with greater than/less than with candy corn as our math symbols. We talk about how the "mouth" always eats the bigger number. After picking number tiles to make their double digit numbers, they decided </>, wrote the symbols and then of course enjoyed their candy! Fun day in math. 

Matching on Monday!

Red Ribbon Week triplets! Lucky to call these fabulous ladies my co-workers and most importantly, friends. 

Happy Saturday!

I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend! I got to spend some quality time with my Godson, soccer game and lunch! Happy Saturday, enjoy your weekend :)

Spiders!

This was one of my favorites! They did some great opinion writing this week, supporting their thoughts with details. We even got out paint and glitter for our spiders! Woohoo! I'm hanging these gems in the hall so they will come home in a few weeks. Be sure to ask your kinder about their opinion!

Sight words 10/26-10/30

Busy week next week with field trip, Red Ribbon week and Halloween festivities so just these four and we'll revisit some from previous week's that we've had trouble with. Test on Friday. They should be able to READ and WRITE them. 

MizzouRAH!

I can always count on my McBride girls to show Tiger pride too! Can't believe how grown up she is. Kelsea was in my first Kinder Crew here at Malinckrodt, time flies when you're having fun! MizzouRAH!

Meet Truman!

Stay tuned for an email describing our new V.I.P Adventures with Truman that will start next week! I am this week's V.I.P and Truman's adventure with me last night was carving and decorating pumpkins!

Opinions!

Today we used a pictograph to graph whether we think a spider would make a good pet or not. We'll use this in math tomorrow but today we started an opinion writing piece and talked about how we should support our opinions with details. They came up with some supporting details!

Author's Purpose is Easy as P.I.E

Today I introduced author's purpose (persuade, inform, entertain). This is a complex comprehension strategy but we'll frequently visit it in conversation. We read Monster Mash and decided it was definitely an entertaining kind of book! 

Eye Can Make 10!

Making 10 is always more fun with eyeballs! Today we practiced making 10 using dice and tens frames. They are getting very quick with their facts and I love seeing the little light bulbs go off when they see the commutative property happening! 

Syllables Challenge!

Today we clapped out the syllables in our name. I'm challenging you to go through the names of the people in your house and clap out the syllables in their name!

Wish List!

Color/black ink cartridges for a Cannon MG2120 printer. These are used to print off our centers and mini units (the school does not have a color printer). 

Digraphs

We've been talking about digraphs and the sounds they make. This is another trick in our magic bag that I told them I'll start looking for them using it in their reading and writing! Ask your kinder to teach you about "when two vowels go walking..." 

Digraphs

We've been talking about digraphs and the sounds they make. This is another trick in our magic bag that I told them I'll start looking for them using it in their reading and writing! Ask your kinder to teach you about "when two vowels go walking..." 

Reading Vocab.10/19-10/23

I had a request to start posting our weekly reading vocabulary words and loved the idea! They will be under the "reading" label. They love learning new words and we try to incorporate them in our daily conversations. 

Weekend Festivities!

I hope everyone had a fabulous weekend! I filled mine with family and celebrations. We were lucky enough to celebrate my grandpa's 80th birthday and my sister's baby shower. I can't wait to be an aunt to baby Genevieve! I also got to see my little bff's Addison and Ethan. Even though I was sick, it is weekends like this that remind me how thankful I am! 

Whole Brain Teaching!

I absolutely love this quote!  I made the choice to teach using Whole Brain Teaching because I saw this quote a few years back.  Every day I watch my students learn and grow and teach each other things using hand motions and terminology that we've come up with together.  I fully encourage you when you see something new we're learning to ask your kinder to teach it to you using hand motions.  Ask them to do "mirror" and teach it to you which means you'll repeat it after them...let's be honest, these littles LOVE to be able to be the teacher which makes my heart happy!  

Bats..Is It a Fact or Opinion?

We had a batastic week exploring and learning about bats!  We started by voting if they were "cute" or "creepy."  This led into our lesson on fact and opinion.  We have defined facts as: something that can be proven true and opinions as: a thought or a feeling.  We did some research and answered the questions from our "we wonder web" and made a list of facts and opinions and color coded them after deciding which they were.  This year we will work a lot with opinion writing pieces and supporting their thinking.  

Thank You!

Thank you SO much for all of the wish list items from the Book Fair!  That was very generous.  I have already added some to the classroom library and the others to my “theme” boxes for specific lessons.  Kid’s books are a key to this teacher’s heart!

Human Number Line

It was time to set aside the math book and make our number line strategy real life!  We talked about the colors and how it showed a pattern with odd/even numbers.  They are coming far with this.  Each day during calendar we discuss: "any number that ends in: 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 is even and any number that ends in: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 is odd."  I encourage you to ask if they can teach you this!  With some help to start they should be able to put it in to action.  We did addition problems with our number line and they hopped up however many they were adding.  The commutative property came up ("we can flip the addends and get the same sum")  which brought us to the conclusion that starting at the larger number is the most effective way to solve the equation.  

Vocabulary incorporated in this lesson: addends/parts, sum/whole, addition sign/plus sign, equals symbol, odd/even, commutative property. 

October Book Studies

What a fun week we had doing a different "book study" each day with some of our Halloween books!  This is one of the four that we did.  From a simple read aloud, we had the best discussions and charted our noticings with: verbs, common/proper nouns, adjectives, wacky "y" words, main idea, setting, characters, onomatopoeia and much more!  The crew really enjoyed this!  They are loving finding "onomatopoeia" whenever they can!  All of our tricks we have, I told them they'd have to teach everyone at home since they are the experts.   

*"Schema" was also introduced to the crew this week: background knowledge.  Using what we already know about something.*

This immediately caught my eye! I work hard on instilling good social skills and focus on character education with my kinders. On a daily basis we discuss integrity and how important that will be for the rest of their lives. This is also something they can earn hot tickets for, so I'm always on the look out for my littles who I can catch doing the right thing even when they don't think I'm watching. 

Have a wonderful weekend Crew! See you all on Monday!

Sight Words 10/19-10/23

play, out, far, want, put, our, for

Let's Go Cards!

Let's go Cardinals! Hoping our attire and singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame will bring us home a winner today. (We do have one Cub's fan who's been a good sport with Ms. Gegg being a big time Cardinals fan! :) ). 

Birds and Tigers!

Have a great weekend, crew! I'll be at the stadium cheering loud and proud for the Cards tonight and will be cheering on the Tigers for homecoming tomorrow. MizzouRAH and GO CARDS! 

Going Batty!

Thursday we launched our next week's theme...bats!!! When I saw Felix walk in I knew just how I'd introduce it and he was the cutest bat I ever did see! We started by graphing if we thought bats are cute or creepy. From there we analyzed our data in math into a bar graph, tallies, more/less. Last, we did a following directions bat craftivity. They are excited to continue our learning fun next week!

Sight Words 10/12-10/15

Sight word assessment on Thursday due to no school next Friday! Students are expected to know these words.

you, call, from, all, of, small, here

Field Trip Fun!

Thank you SO much to our great chaperones: Mr. and Mrs. Leible, Mr. Stephenson, Mrs. Butler, Mr. Alcock and Ms. Pennick! The kids had a fabulous day at the MO Botanical Garden! 

Pretty lucky to go on our field trips with these fabulous teachers (in addition to Mrs. Y and Mrs. Shannon)! 

Fire Safety!

Today we had some great conversation about fire safety and tomorrow we'll write about it. They really enjoyed the site we visited. They have great resources and apps so I thought I'd share it in case they want to revisit:

http://www.sparky.org/mobile/index.php

Problem Solving Like a Pal!

These are our school-wide problem solving steps. We discussed these again today and wrote them in our journals in case we need a reminder. 

Picture Day Fun!

The whole crew looked so nice today! We had some fun with the book, Picture Day, and decided a class pic was necessary! 

Subtraction

Please see below for our subtraction conversation today! 

CVC

As a whole group we did a CvC word sort. We checked which words followed the consonant vowel consonant pattern and sorted them. 

Friday Fun with 5th Grade Buddies

Yesterday we were able to go up to Mr. Keller's room to get a glimpse into robotics. They all had a great time! 

Story Time

A pre-K grandparent who is a scientist,

came to give a fabulous interactive story time about a water molecule. The kids loved it!

Peacemaker Promise

We'll be reciting this at the Dragon Rally on Monday 10/5.

Absolutely love catching my kinders wrapped up in a good book! This chair has so many memories as that's where 12 grand kids sat with our Grandma and Grandpa for stories and visiting. Warmed my heart seeing them cozied up in it!