Fun on the Farm!

Well, we lucked out and missed the raindrops and had a wonderful day at Griebel's Dairy Farm in Lucinda. We got to bottle feed the baby calves, meet some rabbits, kittens and goats and tour the milking parlor where a lot of the children had some really great questions for Susie Griebel-our fearless tour guide. We also enjoyed a picnic lunch in the sunshine in front of the farm house. It turned out to be a beautiful day and a great field trip. See you next year, Susie!

Happy Easter!

We had a busy and exciting today in K108! We made chick masks and our Easter baskets this morning in centers. We even listened to "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Chick" by Lucille Colandro and Jared D. Lee at our listening center. The Easter Bunny came to visit and hid some eggs outside in the courtyard for us! Regan, a 5th grader from Mr. Henry's room, came to read us an Easter story that she wrote and colored with us. It was very nice of her to volunteer her time and we all appreciated it. Happy Easter everyone!

Meeting With Our Prankster Partners!

On Thursday, April 2nd K108 got to meet B-7 through some really cool technology. Mrs. Blazosky and I used Skype to call each other and we used webcams to see each other. Our kiddos got to meet their partner from B-7 as well as watch the interactions on our SmartBoard. Some of the questions and comments were so cute! The children were absolutely amazed at getting to meet their partner through the computer. I cannot wait to see what we come up with next!

B-7's April Fool's Day Pranks

Mrs. Blazosky's 1st graders pranked us good yesterday! Listen to what her class pulled on us!

April Fool's to B-7!

April Fool's everyone! K108 teamed up with Mrs. Traci Blazosky's first grade class at Clarion Area Elementary to pull some super pranks this April Fool's Day! To get us ready I read the book, April Foolishness by Teresa Bateman. The story is about a young boy trying to prank his grandfather on April's Fools day by making up all these crazy accusations about the farm animals on his grandpa's farm. A very cute story and it got us in the mood to plot our pranks on B-7! During Writer's Workshop we drew our prank and wrote a story about it, and then we used VoiceThread to load the pictures into and record our voices telling our prank. Enjoy!

A Very Special Guest Reader

K108 had a very special guest reader yesterday! Mrs. Flick, beloved former 2nd grade teacher, read us Duck on a Bike by David Shannon, sang the song Six Little Ducks with us and gave eaach of us a bookmark with a farm animal on it! How lucky are we? We felt very fortunate to have Mrs. Flick come in and spend some of the afternoon with us! We always enjoy having visitors!

To go along with St. Patrick's Day we also learned about rainbows in our classroom last week. First, we watched a video on our SmartBoard from Discovery UnitedStreaming
about what makes a rainbow. Then we did science centers! They made rainbows out of markers, paper plates, construction paper and green Easter basket grass to represent that there must be rain AND sun present to see a rainbow. We also played a game on the Smartboard where the kids were asked to fill in the correct colors in the rainbow and I did a science experiment with them with just milk, dish soap and food coloring. I out a dab of red, yellow and blue in three seperate sections of a bowl filled with milk. Then I added in the dish soap. The dish soap did not mix with the milk-instead it floated on top making the colors mix and swirl together to make all the colors of a rainbow! The children were amazed as they watched the colors mix and swirl together to see the different colors that were made.

Lucky Leprechauns!

K108 was ransacked by a tiny and mischevious leprechaun on Tuesday, March 17th! Thank goodness that St. Patrick's Day is over and we have a whole year to be safe from such an attack again! He left footprint all over the floor and tables and he even peed green in our toilet! To top it all off he hung our beloved hot potato from the celining! What a sprite!

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

We had a very busy day for Dr. Seuss's birthday on Monday, March 2nd! We had guest readers come into our kindergarten classrooms to read to us-6 in all! We heard some really great stories from former third-grade teacher Tom Mould, Tye Elder's mother, Tammy Elder, former aide, Mrs. Young, former sixth-grade teacher Nancy Davis, former guidance counselor Danny Williams and Sebby's mom, Tina Siegel read for our class in K108! It was a great morning full of great stories, and it is always nice to see former familiar faces come in to visit!

Wordle

At Wordle you can type any words that you want into the text box after you click in the "Create" link. Once all the words you want are typed in the text box, hit the "GO" button at the bottom left and your words will be beautifully arranged for you! But it gets better! You can also change the color, position and font of your words! K108 played with this today by typing in our sight words. We had a blast! Check it out for yourself!

Teddy Bear Clinic

The teddy bear clinic was a great success! The children had a great time learning about taking care of themselves, how to call 911 in an emergency and that the doctor really isn't that scary. We did have some beat-up bears, though, and thank goodness for those kind nurses that helped us fix them right up!

Honest Abes

Hahaha....I got such a chuckle out of this activity! We talked about Abraham Lincoln today in kindergarten and all the great things he did as President. We watched an animated Discovery UnitedStreaming video about him, did a slide puzzle of his face on our SmartBoard and made our own Abraham Lincoln masks! The kids enjoyed it so much that some of them insisted on eating snack while holding their mask up to their faces! Then at the end of the day we walked to the busses wearing our Abe Lincoln faces! We looked like a parade of Presidents! Check back soon for more about George Washington and our brand new president, Barack Obama. We are also going to talk about what we THINK a president does, what we KNOW a president does and then we are going to talk about what we would do as president. I am excited to hear what a 6-year-old has to say about this!

Happy Valentine's Day!

I thought that their mailboxes were so cute! I love how creative and different they all turned out! We had lots of fun at our Valentine's Day party on Friday. We passed out our Valentine's, played some online Valentine's Day games on our new SmartBoard, watched a Discovery UnitedStreaming video about the history and traditions of the holiday, made that nice poem Valentine for our moms and dads and began to make our Valenine's into a keepsake book. I made all my adorable Valentine's that the children gave me into a book, decorated it and am getting it laminated as we speak. After I get it back it will be in our class library to enjoy for years to come!

Hip Hip Hooray! 100 Days of School Today!

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We have been waiting for this all year long and Thursday was finally the big day-the 100th day of kindergarten! Even with the two hour delay we still got some of our activities accomplished. We made 100 day glasses, made 100 handprints, shared our
100 day collection and glued it to a 100 piece grid!

Webinar with Robin Moore

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Today we spent the morning listening to award-winning storyteller and author Robin Moore speak about the history and legends behind Groundhog's Day. We used Elluminate web conferencing software, the Internet, and our new projection system called a SmartBoard(which was graciously awarded to K108 by the Keystone Education Foundation for a grant I wrote this past November) to join the webinar along with over 100 other classrooms across the state. The webinar was sponsored the the PA Department of Education. I hope to find more age-appropriate Webinars for us to participate in, and we are all very excited about the endless ways that we can use our new SmartBoard in everyday instruction.
Robin Moore is an award-winning author and storyteller who grew up in and still lives in the mountains of Pennsylvania. He comes from a long line of storytellers. He has actually visited Keystone Elementary in the past to share his stories and books. As we all know, Phil did indeed see his shadow this morning so that means the dreaded SIX MORE WEEKS of this already loooooong winter. Think spring anyway!

SNOW SNOW SNOW

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Wow! We have gotten quite a bit of snow in January, but it has been much too cold to go outside lately and measure it! Finally, today it was "warm" enough to go outside...at least the sun was shining! We had a blast today measuring the snow that fell on the playground-we almost didn't recognize it-there was so much snow! We have been learning about measurement in math class so all this snow could not have come at a better time because we really got to put our best measurement skills to the test-and we got to go outside for a little bit! :)