Five for Friday

Here it is.... Friday. I am SOOOOOO ready to share my five! So here goes!

 1.  Yesterday we started working on writing. We read a book about a chameleon who changed color according to the mood it was in. We talked about our moods and how they affect our day. We used the sight words "I" and "am" and then phonetically spelled the feeling word we wanted to put in. Some say, "I feel hape." Some of them say "I feel sad." One little guy was having a sad day. We drew a picture of ourselves using the color we thought best depicted the feeling we used in our sentence.

At lunchtime I pulled this one little guy aside and reminded him that he can change how he feels and acts and that maybe after some good lunch, he would have a better day. (It worked!)

 2. Yesterday I talked to students about how sometimes we will practice intruder drills and practice being very quiet in our room. So here we are practicing. They did great.

 3. We've been reading about chameleons all week and today we painted chameleons with KoolAid paint.

We painted chameleons with KoolAid paints! They smell delicious!

 4. Number sense flashcards.... We have been adding to them every week. We started with zero (zero is our hero.... z-e-r-o!) and have 4 cards for each number: a card with the correct number of objects (zero has a blank card), the number word, the numeral, and a ten-frame that is filled in with the correct number of dots. Today was the first day we practiced sorting and matching them up.

5. "Cool Beans!" We had our second cool beans celebration on Monday. We ended the day with popcorn and Tom and Jerry cartoons. I loved watching my students laugh so hard, and everyone could enjoy them, even my ELL students! What I love is that they are short and sweet and if we watch them for 15 minutes, they have watched several skits and laughed and laughed. It was a great ending to the day that day.

Cool Beans is our classroom positive behavior incentive. When we receive a compliment from another teacher, we get a "big bean" (a large magnet bean on the white board). When we fill 4 rows of 5 (20 beans), we get a whole class celebration. We also get to add a big bean if.... a student fills their personal chart with 20 stickers and earns their individual reward, we fill our cool beans can (20 beans... this is a lot like a marble jar, moving a bean to the big can when we meet expectations, follow directions, etc.). These guys work so hard. Sometimes it's easy to forget how hard it is to learn to be in school. Kindergarten is hard! Students have to learn how to work with others, walk quietly, follow directions from many different adults, and this doesn't even begin to address all the academic pressure on children in Kindergarten these days! These little people are poised to take off and read and learn all about addition and subtraction. They are on the verge of greatness! But let's face it, they work hard just learning how to students! Sorry, I was preaching to myself. I love my class. And they are great learners and hard workers. But sometimes I tend to push too hard.