Apples Galore!

We read a story about a farmer named Annie.  She grew in the apples in an orchard and then took them to market in a truck.  She sold muffins, and pies, and lots of apples.  We created a flow map to show the order of the book.

This is the orchard.  Notice one child said someone cut down one of his trees!

These are our trucks going to market.

Market place is fun.  We have a farmer's market so some of the kids were familiar with this.

Here they are at my house for me to eat!

 We had a tasting day on Friday with lots of parents helping us out.  I never knew apples could be fixed so many ways!!

Each class made a graph of which color apple was our favorite.  It was surprising!

We saw a clip on Brain Pop, Jr. about Johnny Appleseed then we sequenced the order of apple planting from seed to tree.  It takes 10 years for a tree to produce fruit!

Each class made a class wide promise on the rules we would follow this year as we became leaders in our school.  The children helped brainstorm the ideas for the rules and every child in the class signed the promised...just like in the constitution of the USA!

We are learning syllables in kindergarten.  We clapped each name the child put his or her name on the correct number of fingers!

Recycle, Reuse. or Restore?

This grade level is very into reusing things.  Pinterest is our BEST friend.  We talked about how glad we are to have someone who picks up our trash.  We watched trashy town and then we created these adorable trash men.  I think we saw them on Chalktalk blog.  We glued these in our science spiral next to a recycle symbol.

The Leader in Me

We are beginning a new process at our school.  If you have never read The Leader in Me go right now to the nearest bookstore and get a copy.  We are hoping to change our children's lives by teaching them how to be prepared for what the future holds.  They are all leaders and we are finding the strengths in each one and polishing it so that child will feel good about themselves.  The book is based on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Sean Covey.  We are teaching the 7 habits right now.  Kinder had 30 students until a week ago so we are just on habit 5 this week.

      

The first habit is to be proactive.  We tell the children they are in charge of themselves.  They are responsible for making good choices even when no one is watching them.  They are also responsible for the attitude they carry with them.

The second habit is the have a plan.  We made a plan on how we can all get to first grade by May!  We post our weekly goals in the room and review them on Friday to see if we met our goals.

The third habit is to put first things first.  We tell the children work before play!  We talk a lot about this habit and the benefits it can bring!
Habit four is to think win-win.  We brainstormed lots of ideas of how everyone can be a winner.  I don't have a picture of our anchor chart yet!

We wrote a grant the week before school and we found out on the 19th that our plan was accepted.  We were able to buy 5 digital cameras to take pictures of the children doing the leader in me activities.  As soon as I figure out the camera I will take lots of pictures!

Has anyone seen our gingerbread man?

 We colored our boys and girls then cut them out to create a graph.  We have more girls in our class than boys.  We learned to use kindertools like scissors and crayons.

 We used glue in this activity.  We learned to color first, then cut, and then create a gingerbread man puzzle.

 When we went to get our gingerbread man from the cafeteria, he had run away!  We made a lost and found poster to hang in the hallway.

 After touring the entire school all week, Ginger was found hiding in the principal's office.  Mrs. Fulkerson told us all about how she captured him!

 We used gingerbread playdoh to create our own gingerbread man and then we got to take a small bag home with us!

 We did a science experiment of what would happen to the gingerbread man if he jumped in the river.  Not a pretty sight!!

This is all that is left of our gingerbread man.  I wonder what we will do next week!!

New School year 2013-14

 This is my classroom for this year!  Lots of children to start with at 29!

 Mrs. Voss has a reading loft in her class.

 Mrs. Shelton's room has a cool tree and lots of lights.

 Mrs. Diaz is our new bilingual teacher.

Mrs. Anderson has a bright classroom.  She is also a bilingual teacher!

Leader in Me

We are hoping to develop a whole new atmosphere on our campus this year!  Who would like to be a leader?  Well, we plan to have a over 600 leaders at Ortiz as we search for the strengths in every child!  Watch out world here we come!

New year with lots of changes!

We finished up our school year with a unit on the ocean.  I took lots of pictures but the storage part of the blog was full!!  I will have to figure out what to do now because I loved posting the pictures of the activities! 
I created a movie of the rainforest and of our zoo trip using IMovie on the ipad!  If you don't have it, I am recommending it!!  It was so much fun!  Our team created a private YouTube account so we could pull our movies up and show them on the Promethean board for the end of the year program with our parents!  It was amazing! 

I can't believe how fast this summer has gone!  This is the first summer since my husband has retired so we have gone lots of places and done lots of things together.  I read the MathWork Stations by Debbie Diller. (I know I am a summer behind!)  I looked back and followed the book study from last summer as I read.  Wow...it was an eye opener!  I will definitely be adjusting my math station time. 

The Forest!

We watched a very cute You Tube song about toucans.  It told us that toucans eat fruit, berries, and seeds.  They are black and white with red, green and orange on them.  Hmmmm!

There is a wonderful You Tube video called Green Anaconda!  I sang it all last weekend because it got stuck in my head!!!  We each created our own rainforest snake.

 This was a great book and it was easy enough for the kids to read most of the words. We also went to Pebble Go and got lots of information about the animals from that.

These are our monkeys.  It was very interesting the way some of them came together.  Legs and arms and tails were everywhere!

 This is the map we colored showing where the tropical rainforest were found in our world.

We talked about how important it is to save the rainforest.  Lots of food and medicine come from the rainforest.  We talked about being a scientist and studying things from there.  We also talked about how fun it would be to be a photographer and take pictures of the animals there.

These next four slides show our literacy tubs for this week.  I forgot to take pictures last week!

 This was a fun exploring lesson.  I had 12 animals pictures posted around the room.  The kids had a recording sheet and a clipboard.  They had to explore the room and find the hidden animals and write the animal names on the sheet.

 In this game, the kids took turns spinning a spinner and putting a tally mark at the top part.  When time was called, they had to create a bar graph with their information.

 This tub had lots of words that the kids could practice copying in their journals.

This tub was fun.  The kids picked a card and copied the sentence on their journal.  They got to be the editor as there was no capital at the beginning of the sentence and no punctuation at the end!  These all came from Kelli Bordelon's unit.

 This is the book I downloaded several years ago (sorry but I don't remember where I got it).  It has lots of pictures about the frogs in the rain forest.

 These are the frogs we created and hung in the forest.  I put a few in the hall for our other classes to see but most are hanging around in the rainforest in our room.

 This is a great book I bought from scholastic one year.  It is hard to find books about sloths.  We did watch one on you tube with Jeff Corwin and it had lots of good information.

We created this sloth from instructions in the the unit from Kerri Bourdelon.  You should look her up and follow her on teacherspayteachers.  She has some great stuff!

Digraphs

We are going to learn about digraphs this last 4 weeks of school.  This week was ch.  We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and created a tree with the letters on it.  We made a chart of ch words.

 This is a game where the kids sorted words that start with ch and those that have ch at the end of the word.

Rain Forest

 This is my very favorite unit.  There are so many cute things to make and ideas to talk about it.  The rainforest gives us so much...like chocolate!  Oh, and of course oxygen!!

Saw this cute post on Pinterest and bought the unit from Kerri Bordelon.  I love everything in it!

 We read this book and talked about patterns found in nature.  There are lots of examples in the rainforest of patterns on the animals.

 These are our torn paper alligators.  They are so cute and everyone is different.  Some were very small and some were very big!

 This is how the alligator pie turned out.  It was yummy.

These butterflies had lots of patterns and texture to them.  We glued small pieces of tissure paper to the cutouts. 

 One table got only blue paper to make the big blue morpho butterflies.

 The kids loved this story.  We saw a chameleon at the zoo last week so they could relate to this book.

 We waterpainted and they really like that!  I had two spills but...it all turned out fine!

We are doing a tree map book from Kerri's unit as well.  The kids are enjoying the research we are doing on the animals.  We have books and PebbleGo and United Streaming.

 This is one of the books with lots of information about the rainforest animals.

 We did several work sheets (as much as I do not like them!)  This one lets the kids sort the animals by attributes.

 This work sheet makes a graph of flowers.  They had to read the color words and cut the flowers out and glue them in the correct row.