Things To Know

Photo Gallery

Centers and Things in Our Kindergarten Classroom

Our Sound Muncher

We'd like to introduce you to a very special friend, the Sound Muncher. Although the Sound Muncher is always hungry, he is a very picky eater and will only eat items that start with the letter that we are learning about. He will eat real items or pictures of things beginning with the appropriate letter. Sometimes your child may be asked to bring in an item that starts with the letter that we are studying, so that s/he can feed it to the Sound Muncher. Items will be returned after we've finished our letter study. Thanks for your cooperation!

This is our behavior traffic light. We try to do our best and stay on green all day long!

Whenever Mrs. Thompson catches us being good, we get a sticker on our behavior chart. When we get a certain number of stickers, we get to go to the treasure box & pick a prize!

Some of the Things That We Do in Kindergarten

Mrs. Thompson sings the "If You're Ready for the Hall" song to help us line up & get ready to walk in the hall.

Here we are hanging our backpacks and coats on our cubby hooks.

We eat snack everyday in the afternoon.

Pattern blocks and pattern block workmats are fun to explore and design with.

Can you name all 6 pattern block shapes?

(orange square, green triangle, red trapezoid, blue rhombus, tan rhombus, yellow hexagon)

We enjoy doing puzzles and playing with jumbo magnetic letters on the whiteboard.

Enjoying a book with a friend is always enjoyable!

Some kids like to play with table toys.

Other kids like to play at the Lego table.

We build with hollow blocks and regular blocks in block area.

Many of us like to play with the houses, cars, and farm sets.

The small colored blocks are lots of fun to build with too!

These friends are exploring with oval links.

Pretending in the dramatic play center is a lot of fun!

.We play in the science center.The microscope is always a favorite.

We recite and act out nursery rhymes in Kindergarten.

After we read the poem, "Jack Be Nimble," we put each of our names in the poem and acted it out by jumping over our pretend candlestick.

Our wonderful PTA sponsored an assembly called Poppytown Puppets.

At assemblies in the auditorium, we need to sit quiety and be a good audience.

We use the world map and the map of the United States in our class. Ask us what the blue represents and what all the other colors represent. We know that we live in New York State. We have been receiving postcards from other classes from all over the United States. When we receive one, we add a pin to the state that it came from.

We learned about,compared the similarities & differences of,& explored with Unifix cubes and linking cubes.

See this neat structure they built from linking cubes!

School and Bus Theme

At this center, we each had to match the buses with numerals to the schools that had that many kid stickers on them.

We traced, painted, cut, and decorated our school buses to go with our first class book that we made called,

Who Got on the Bus?

You can see both hanging on the bulletin board.

This is our bus graph that we did.

Do you remember what bus # you ride on?

We made school buses for snack. They were yummy!

The Kissing Hand Story

We made Chester the Raccoon from The Kissing Hand story by watching & listening to Mrs. Thompson's step-by-step directions.

We made a class book entitled, "Our Kissing Hands." Here it is hanging with some other buses that we made.

This is our Kissing Hand alphabet game.

We had to work cooperatively to match & sequence the uppercase letter cards.

We are playing a Kissing Hand color memory game.

This is our Kissing Hand math game.

We had to pick raccoon number cards and put that many heart counters on it.

At this center we sorted colored foam hearts onto the correct raccoon color workmats.

Thanks to Mrs.Taber for helping us make our Kissing Hand cookies! They were cute and delicious!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Theme

We had to sort cards in a bag into one of the four categories in the pocket chart.

Then we each had our own worksheet to complete. It said "Does it go on the coconut tree?" so we put only letters on the yes side of the paper and shapes, numbers, and other things went on the no side.

Here are some of the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom literacy & math centers that we did:

At this center, we had to spell our names with magnetic letters on the coconut tree workmats. Then we used capital & lowercase stamps to spell our names on a worksheet that we colored.

We each had one capital & one lowercase coconut tree workmat & a cupful of alphabet tiles that we had to sort onto the correct workmat.

Here we had to work cooperatively to sequence the coconut trees with letters on them into the pocket chart. Then we did a worksheet on which we had to color the correct path of the alphabet.

We are cooperatively playing a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom alphabet bingo game.

At free choice time, the kids could also play a few different games.

One game had palm trees with numerals written on the trunk of each. The kids had to put the trees in order & then put the correct number of coconuts (Cocoa Puffs) on each tree.

(Of course you got to eat the coconuts when you were done, but only after Mrs. T. checked them!)

The other game had palm tree workmats with capital letters on them. You had to find either the capital or lowercase foam letters that matched & put them on top.

At one center we had to match the capital and lowercase letters to form the trees.

We counted & put the correct number of palm tree counter sticks in each cup, based on the number that was written on the coconut on each cup.

We worked cooperatively to match & sequence the coconut tree number cards 1-30 onto the workmat.

We worked on number recogniton, counting, & 1:1 correspondence using Chicka Chicka Boom Boom workmats & coconut tree counters.

We played a coconut number matching & memory game.

We used our five senses to investigate a coconut.

Can you name the 5 senses and the body part that is used for each?

This boy made a great observation! He said that a coconut looks like a bowling ball because it has the three circles on one end. Here he is demonstrating how he would hold it if it were a bowling ball!

These friends are making and enjoying the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom snack that we made with graham crackers (tree trunk), Cocoa Puffs & grapes (coconuts), green apple slices (tree leaves), and Alphabit cereal.

She is looking at 3 different coconuts. A new, fresh one, an old broken coconut shell, and an old, dried out, whole coconut. Do you remember how each one felt and sounded like? Which one was the heaviest?

We are making Chicka Chicka Boom Boom trees by free-form cutting a trunk from brown paper, tracing a green top, and then gluing on foam letters to spell our names! We also used Bingo dabbers to add the dots to the perimeter of the paper just like in the story!

Here are our own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom trees that we made by painting our forearm brown for the trunk of the tree & our hands green for the leaves. Then we wrote each letter of our name on brown circles (coconuts).

This is our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom flannelboard that we played with by putting letters on it.

This is a poem that we learned & then put it in our poetry journals.

We read this chant & then we did a writing activity about our favorite thing about Kindergarten.