Celebrations!

Over the past few weeks, we have been doing a lot of celebrating! And much on my behalf!

First of all, I had a birthday and turned 22! I don't think there is any better place to celebrate your birthday than in Kindergarten. The kids think birthdays are pretty darn special!

Tressie made my birthday super special in many ways! One being that she made pizza for the whole team as a birthday lunch! Awesome! Thank you Tressie! :)

Then last week, we celebrated my last day of student teaching. It was bittersweet. I am very excited about graduating but I am also in love with 15 five year olds!

I gave each of the kids a little bug catching kit and we had a bug hunt as part of our little goodbye celebration!

Then today, I was honored to receive the "Always Expect More of Aggie Teachers" Award from Texas A&M. Both Tressie and my university supervisor sent a recommendation letter in to nominate me and I won it!

So today while I was substituting, I was surprised by all the kids, Tressie, the school principal, my university supervisor, and the student teaching director who all came to deliver the award!

All this celebrating has me feeling like a pretty special gal! I want to give big thank you to all the kids and their parents for allowing me to be a part of their Kindergarten experience! AND I want to give a huge THANK YOU to Tressie! My ambition to become a teacher has grown so much stronger throughout this semester and it is all thanks to you!

I made this little video with pictures taken over the past few weeks:

Newsletter 4-11-11

We published our poetry!

To finish up our poetry unit, the kids chose their very best piece of poetry to add to a class book of poems. They were so proud of their work!

Miss Farnie put all the poems into these cute little books for each student to take home.

We spent a lot of time looking at these books on Thursday. The kids had so much fun reading each other's poems and sharing their writing with friends.

After practicing, we went next door to share our poems with another Kindergarten class:

This and That!

We have been so busy over the past few weeks!

Here is a quick recap of some of the things we have been talking about!

We've learned to identify living and nonliving things!

We've finished up our Texas studies!

During stations, we are learning more about word families!

We are learning to add and subtract!!

Transformations!

Just last week our caterpillars were just these little guys:

By Thursday they had grown to at least ten times that size and some were in cocoons!

The kids have been so excited about seeing them change! Hopefully by next week we will be be looking at butterflies!

We're Poets!

We have had so much fun talking and learning more about poetry.

Today we talked about how really great poems begin with a big idea that gives us a big feeling in our heart. We practiced by creating poem as a class.

Tressie asked the kids what a good big idea for a poem about something that gives us a big feeling would be and one student responded with, "our class family!" Pretty sweet huh?

First we created a web to jot down little moments and ideas that go with our big idea!

Then we worked on turning that web into a poem!

The kids have been really busy working on their own poetry. Each student will "publish" their best piece of poetry on Friday to share with the class!

Newletter 4-4-11

Kindergarten Rodeo