MORE 100s day

This really must have been the biggest celebration this school has ever seen! 

Just look at these pictures:

THE 100th day of school!

We are so lucky to have THIS mom that made this awesome banner for our class:

It made the 100th day of school 100 times more exciting!!!

 Here are some of our celebrations:

Reading "The 50 Hike"

 Putting together this puzzle (which was actually REALLY hard)

 

 Counting and popping 100 kernels of popcorn:

 

 more of reading "The 50 Hike"

 

Guessing how far 100 steps is in the hall, then counting it:

 

100 pieces of cereal to start the day: 

  It was QUITE obvious that not everyone counted out 100 pieces of cereal.....

 Did I mention that we dressed like we were 100 years old???

 Look at those grey hairs!!!

 

 The Macarena count to 100:

 Writing from 1-100 with the 4th grade buddies:

 

 Their hats have 100 dots

 They grow up so fast...

 We just HAD to take this picture shaking the cane:

 

 A 100 year old chair!!!

 And HERE is what the kids would REALLY look like at age 100:

 I myself hardly need the iphone app to age myself:

 Our class book:

Great behavior party

Students who made great choices in class were invited to have some fun during a crazy little party....

 The messier the better! Right?

Groundhog Day

I am not sure how this holiday has survived so many years, but we have decided to turn it into a learning experience in our kindergarten room. On February 1st the students made predictions and we graphed them:

And the winner is ... NO SHADOW! Spring is coming!!!

What great guessers these kids are!

THE -ed family

We are really picking up the pace with reading now that everyone knows their letters and sounds! 

It's time for WORD FAMILIES!!!! YAY!!! I just love word families because the kids think we are just playing and they pick them up so quickly. 

Here the kids are putting a red sled in bed and in a shed:

 They thought it was SO fun to interact with the book.

 On the last page the kids get to decide where they would put the red sled and fill it in.

 In case you couldn't tell, this was also pajama day at school

This lesson and many more hands on word family activities can be used to enhance your child's learning experience at home. Give your child an academic boost by visiting http://education.byu.edu/seel/library/category/217  

Here's a great explanation of why word families are SO important:

Word families, sometimes called phonograms or chunks, can really help emergent readers begin to understand our complicated, and often inconsistent, language by providing some predictable patterns within words. When learning to read, patterns are important. Children recognize word patterns and this makes it easier when sounding out words.

For example, consider the "est" word family. First, show "est" to your child and have him/her repeat the sound. Then show the word "best" and demonstrate how you can read the word by first making the "b" sound and then the "est". Repeat it slowly and then more quickly. Now continue with some other members of the "est" family such as nest, pest, rest, test, vest, west.

Can you see how much easier this method of using chunks of letters is compared to sounding out one letter at a time? We break words into chunks naturally as skilled readers and teaching children this skill can help them learn to read.

What is even better is that once children learn the 37 most common word families in English, they will be able to decode 500 words! That puts emergent readers well on their way to mastering the entire decoding process. The most common word families include: ack, ain, ake, ale, all, ame, an, ank, ap, ash, at, ate, aw, ay, eat, ell, est, ice, ick, ide, ight, ill, in, ine, ing, ink, ip, it, ock, oke, op, ore, ot, uck, ug, ump, unk.

Word families are indeed an efficient way to get children reading. Once children learn these one-syllable phonograms then they will more easily be able to decode longer words too.

-from http://mrsmayersgracefieldkindergartenclass.blogspot.com/2009/09/word-families.html