Our Special Friends

Our special friends were in for it when they entered Room Thirty-One. We put them right to work after only a few minutes touring the classroom. Students worked with their special friend to complete a Venn Diagram of school experiences. 

After their Venn's were complete kindergartener's took control of the pen and created a second person narrative from the data they collected. 

Once we finished our best writing, some students choose to read their work to the class during Author's Chair. 

Viejitos Baile

On Monday we began learning "Los Viejitos" (The Elderly) with resident artist Rebecca Martinez. Ms. Martinez will be teaching us this dance until our May 6th and 7th performances. 

Ask your child to show you on of the many steps!

Silent Reading

The year began with "dream time" in room 31. A transformation of these five-year-olds have allowed this time to become silent reading time. At least two days a week we cool down a bit by self-selecting text we believe are "not to easy, not to hard...but juuust right!" 

When Mrs. Kurkinen taps one of these kindergarteners on the shoulder, they dutifully begin quietly reading aloud in order to share their ability. 

Mapping Mexico

This week we began our cartography unit along with a social studies unit on Mexico. Everyday we joined Mrs. McCalley's class to map out various geographic locations using room 34's SMART Board. The forty-two students bonded together for the common good. Mrs. McCalley's students were enthralled to be learning in Spanish and our kindergarteners were mesmerized by the latest educational technology. Sra. Kurkinen, on the other hand was a tad overwhelmed by teaching 42 children in Spanish and learning how to orient SMART technology at the same time. By Friday, however, I got the hang of it. Mrs. McCalley and I are excited to join forces once again this week in order to finish our Mexico Map Books. Thanks to all the volunteers who took the time to put them together!

Our Third Grade Immersion Buddies helped finish up some of our work on Friday. Having written the entire text in Spanish, we challenged our buddies to read our work aloud. The gauntlet was thrown and the eight year old fired back, pointing out all the site we failed to include on our various maps. The third graders were happy to help us fill them in and even more so to hear we will need their help next week to complete a variety of folk art pieces.

Spring Shape Study

Geometric shapes have taken over room thirty-one. To complement our unit of cartography and Mexico we have been studying the vast verity of shape in our world. The characteristics and terminology of shape were the first to be discussed and discovered. Then the manipulation of such shapes. Finally we began to build with our new knowledge to form new shapes.



Paul, Zach and Levi work to build a structure and record the three demential shapes needed to replicate it. Terminology every kindergartner should know:

Cylinder, cone, pyramid, rectangular prism, sphere, triangular prism and cube.

After discussing the text The Village of Round and Square Houses, students work to build a village out of two dimensional shapes. They are challenged to build a 'round house' sturcture they believe could actually stand.

Children work together to find a way to match the 'footprint' of 3-D shapes on a puzzle board. They quickly discover that not all the faces perfectly match a single figure. The students must build another 3-D shape to match the 'footprint'.

Caitlin and Mac are competing to win a 'hexagon race'. They each have a die with six a 2-D shape on each face. They must roll to find out which 2-D shape the can place within any of the six hexagons on their game-board. They first kindergartener to create six whole out of the fractional pieces wins! Some were challenged to record these fractions in mathematical terms. Other  wrote:

1 trapezoid + 1 rhombus + 1 triangle = one hexagon

or

1/2 + 1/3 + 1/6 = 1

On of the favorite math centers this week was landscaping with pattern block paper. Children used each of our 2-D shapes to create a setting for their writing workshop piece. Thank you Mrs. Hummelt for painstakingly cutting out all of our shapes!

The ZOO, + 96 Other Critters

What do you get when you take wild life, some fencing, frigid temperatures and a hundred five year olds? The ZOO, adult Advil necessities and smiles.







Kindergarten was treated with an up-close view of the polar bears celebrating St. Patrick's Day. The bears licked St. Patties off of the glass six inches away from our faces. The kids also really enjoyed learning how polar bears use play structures... they flip 'm, crush 'em and sink 'em!



A huge thanks goes out to our six parent volunteers for making this day as educational as possible. Each group was responsible for reporting on the animal of their choice, and getting us all back alive! We are all indebted to the Fitzloffs, Gordons, Stephens, Bozichs, Hummelts, and Margolis' for allowing this day to take place!

The Tests the Thing

At the end of March kindergarten was thrown into the gauntlet of assessments. Our five and six-year-olds were more than up the the challenge. WIthout straining everyone of us wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote even more. We proved our phonemic awareness with individualized variable games, built magnificent structures to prove our problem solving capabilities and wrote some more to display the enormous progress we have made in writing.






Through it all Kindergarten didn't break a sweat. Even those of us who are disinclined to immediate acquiesces did not put their pencils down before they proudly proved their knowledge. Lehna even had time to contemplate more pressing matters when she finished.

One Hundred Days and Counting...

The hundredth day of school went began with one hundred exercises at the hundredth second of the day. Students completed math centers focused on the numbers, even creating a pattern with one hundred pieces. After art, everyone wrote about what it would be like to live one hundred years and what the might look like. Apparently centenarians like to eat oatmeal. Or so four or five of us believe.







Our hundreds day parade took us through many classrooms wearing our traditional Zero-the-Hero costumes.