News of the Week—May 10-14

POPCORN WORDS:  MY. BY. ONE

READING: At the beginning of the week we made connections to a character and their problem in the story.  We asked ourselves…”Has that happened to me?”  We talked about something special breaking or getting/wanting a pet and thought “Has that ever happened to me?” Later in the week, we learned more about characters in the books we read. We read more Froggy books and compared the adventures Froggy goes on in different books. Then we compared two different characters in an Elephant and Piggie book. We noticed what was the same about them and what was different. It is fun studying and learning about characters!

WRITING:  We were busy building our strength in writing Small Moment stories this week.  The kinders are working hard each day.  They chose a story that is true and about themselves.  Then they told the story across their fingers, focusing on the beginning, middle and end.  Drawing the pictures and writing the words came next and ending by sharing their stories with a friend. What hard work!  I am proud of their progress!

MATH:  We compared objects this week.  The kinders learned what longer than, shorter than and  taller than really mean by going on a hunt around the room for real objects they could measure against their pencil.  We also compared objects that are heavier or lighter.   We finished the week by starting to review various math skills we have studied in this unit.  We will be working as “office workers” next week by taking our last math test. 

LITERACY/PHONICS:  We were very busy working on these literacy skills…

  • sorting pictures having short e,o,i  sounds
  • making new words by changing the vowels and other letters
  • reading a short story and answering comprehension questions
  • studying our popcorn words—by, my, one
  • learning to read and write plurals in words 

KOOL KINDER AND THE GUESSING BAG:  The items this week paper clips, Hot Wheels cars, pennies, popcorn and Skittles.

WE SHINE AS READERS:  Pictures using our flashlights to read 🙂

REMINDERS

  • Bring 2 snacks each day to school and a water bottle with a spill proof lid please. 
  • Return take home books and library books on Wednesday.  We are collecting all  books for summer inventory.
  • Watch the weather. Please keep in mind that even though the season is spring, some days will be cold, wet and rainy, others will be warm and sunny.  Please continue to send a coat, with your kinder. Boots are not needed unless it rains. Thanks! :).  

UPCOMING DATES

*Monday, May 17—STEAM

*Tuesday, May 18—MUSIC

*Wednesday, May 19—GYM; Return TAKE HOME & LIBRARY BOOKS

*Thursday, May 20—ART If your kinder would like a sack lunch from the lunch service, please email me or write a note by Thursday, 5/20

*Friday, May 21–ART  Fast Friday (Early Release) 12:15 p.m. Dismissal. MY STATE IS GREAT–wear clothes which show a place in Michigan

***Have a WONDERFUL weekend. It sounds like it could be a nice weekend to be outside. Mrs. Bohl

News of the Week—May 3-7

Thank you so much for the cards and gifts this week to celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week.  I LOVE my job and your kinders!  I am very grateful and blessed to spend my days with them.

POPCORN WORDS:  HAVE. ON.  OF

READING: We continued our study about characters.  We made connections to how the characters in books are feeling.  We looked at their facials expressions, body language and actions to help us learn more about them.  We read some of our favorite books like Llama Llama, Little Critter and Froggy.

 

 

 

Looking at their facial expressions.  How are they feeling?

. Looking at their body language.  How do they look?

  Looking at their actions.  What are they doing?

WRITING:  We revisited small moment stories this week.  We started by thinking of a story that is absolutely true and all about you. We told the story to ourselves and then to a friend (what happened first, next and last). We drew a quick sketch of the beginning, the middle and the end on sticky notes. Then we started writing our story! We made a cover page, a beginning, middle and end. We added pictures and labels to our writing and did our best work! I am so proud of how hard the kinders worked.

LITERACY/PHONICS: Some of the activities we worked on this week were:

  • sorting pictures having short a and short i sounds
  • writing words and sentences with a and i vowels
  • finding popcorn words in books
  • making words in the -og word family
  • reading a short story and answering comprehension questions
  • listening for beginning and ending sounds in words
  • looking for mistakes in sentences (capitals, punctuation) and fixed them

MATH: The kinders learned about the words greater than, less than and equal.  We counted objects and compared them, telling which group was greater, less, equal. Then we crossed out or added objects to make the groups equal.  We also made teen numbers of 11-20 and wrote number equations, noticing how the partners switch places (4+2=6 and 2+4=6). The kinders had fun walking around the room finding hidden pictures and solving the addition problems. The kinders have grown SO much in their math skills!  

KOOL KINDER AND THE SURPRISE BAG AND THE GUESSING BAG:  The items this week M&M’s, candy, goldfish crackers, gummy bears and beads.

 We celebrated a birthday.  Thank you for the birthday treat!!

I hope that ALL mothers and grandmothers have a beautiful day on Sunday.  You play such an important role in your kinder’s life. Your kinder loves you very much.  I hope that you enjoy the small gift that your kinder made for you. They were very excited to take it home! 🙂

REMINDERS

  • Bring 2 snacks each day to school and a water bottle with a spill proof lid please. 
  • Return take home books and library books on Wednesday.  We only have a few weeks left!  🙂
  • Watch the weather. Please keep in mind that even though the season is spring, some days will be cold, wet and rainy.  Please continue to send a coat, with your kinder. Boots are not needed unless it rains. Thanks! :).  
  • Thank you for sending in jokes!  We had a lot of giggles and laughs.  🙂

UPCOMING DATES

*Monday, May 10—ART

*Tuesday, May 11—STEAM

*Wednesday, May 12—MUSIC; TAKE HOME BOOKS & LIBRARY Don’t forget your books! Thank you for taking the time to write comments about your kinder’s reading of their TAKE HOME books.  That is so helpful 🙂

*Thursday, May 13—GYM 

*Friday, May 14–ART Bring a flashlight to read with today.

***Have a WONDERFUL weekend. Mrs. Bohl

 

 

News of the Week—April 26-30

POPCORN WORDS:   COME.  SOME

WRITING:  We read books and watched some videos about COWS before we wrote facts onto our “have, can, are” charts. The kinders decided which facts they wanted to include in their own All About Cows books.  They worked independently to put their facts into sentences, remembering to use capital letters, spaces between words and sentence stoppers, before drawing detailed pictures.  This was their “on-demand/test” of our All About ___ writing genre. This informational book will be graded and used for our final report card grade on informational writing. The kinders did a fabulous job!  I can’t wait to share how well they did with you.  

We made a cute cow craft on Friday.  It was ‘moo’arvlous fun! 🙂

READING: We began a new unit called Character Round-Up.  In this unit, we will dive deeper into learning about characters. We started by learning that a character can be an animal, person or thing, characters can talk and characters can change, plus more. Then we took time to look closely at what characters look like. We learned more about characters by studying what they say or do and asking ourselves “Are they nice? Are they mean?”.  We can also learn about characters through what other characters do and comparing them to the main character.

MATH:  We worked on finding partners of number 7 by using 2 colors of unifix cubes.  What fun!  We also worked in our math books making groups of objects equal by drawing more objects, comparing objects that are Greater than or Less than, solving addition and subtraction problems and found totals of number partners. We had fun playing FLOWER POWER to practice writing addition and subtraction equations.

LITERACY/PHONICS: We learned that every word has at least one vowel.  Mabel told us we can use a new super power…VOWEL POWER when we look at words.  She gave each of us our own vowel shields to help us accomplish this. We searched through big books to find as many vowels as we could. We also worked on…

  • reading a short story and answering comprehension questions
  • making words in the -IT family
  • listening for and writing vowels
  • sentence dictation – writing all the sounds we hear in the words

KOOL KINDER AND THE SURPRISE BAG AND THE GUESSING BAG:  The items this week were legos, popcorn, chocolate chips and mint candies

STUFFED ANIMAL DAY FUN

REMINDERS

  • Bring 2 snacks each day to school and a water bottle with a spill proof lid please. 
  • Return take home books and library books on Wednesday
  • Watch the weather. Please keep in mind that even though the season is spring, some days will be cold, wet and rainy.  Please continue to send a coat, with your kinder. Boots are not needed unless it rains. Thanks! :)
  • *MAY/JUNE CALENDAR:  The MAY calendar and JUNE calendar can be found at the top of our blog under CALENDARS.  You can also refer to the paper copy that was sent home this week.  

UPCOMING DATES

*Monday, May 3—GYM

*Tuesday, May 4—ART

*Wednesday, May 5—STEAM; TAKE HOME BOOKS & LIBRARY Don’t forget your books! Thank you for taking the time to write comments about your kinder’s reading of their TAKE HOME books.  That is so helpful 🙂

*Thursday, May 6—MUSIC 

*Friday, May 7–GYM. Bring a joke to school today!

***Have a fabulous weekend. Mrs. Bohl

 

Last Call for BOOK ORDERS!!

LAST CALL FOR ANY BOOK ORDERS!  I WILL BE SUBMITTING THE ORDER TOMORROW. 4/27

You may send into school the completed paper form along with a check made out to Scholastic Reading Club OR you may order online at  https://orders.scholastic.com/L77G6   This link should connect you directly to our class.  The books should arrive in 2-3 weeks.

Thanks for supporting and encouraging your kinder to read!  If you have any questions please contact me at kbohl@hpseagles.net

THIS IS THE LAST BOOK ORDER FOR THE YEAR.  FEEL FREE TO LOOK AT OTHER BOOK ORDER FORMS ONLINE TOO.

News of the Week—April 19-23

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EARTH DAY: We enjoyed making and wearing our Earth Day hats on Thursday. We read Just a Gum Wrapper and It’s Earth Day! by Mercer Mayer among other books to assist in our learning about Earth Day.  We learned how we can take care of the earth and “go green” by recycling paper, cans and bottles, turning off lights when leaving a room, turning off the water while brushing teeth and using containers instead of plastic baggies for snacks. The kinders used this information to create a craft.  Having a chance to marble paint was part of the fun. 

We took a few minutes to find out where the 4th graders each week take our bags of scraps of paper.  The kinders were surprised to learn that we have a big recycling bin in our school parking lot.  Looking inside at all of that paper was pretty cool too. (Sorry…no pictures of that.  I was too busy lifting 22 kinders up to look inside) Many kinders said that they recycle at home.  Keep working to keep our earth healthy and clean.

   

Cheers were heard when I explained what we would be doing with blue & green frosting, a popsicle stick and a cookie……making an Earth Day cookie. Who knew that frosting and cookies make kinders explode with cheers?  🙂 Love it!!

     

POPCORN WORDS:   THEY. THESE

MATH: We found partners of 6 & 10, used the symbol of equal (=) and not equal (=with/through it) to find groups that are fewer, showed teen umbers as 10 and extra ones and solved addition problems.  We learned how to play Domino Dots to practice addition.  What fun!

WRITING: Our topic of study this week was CHICKENS.  We read many different non-fiction books on chickens while writing down many interesting facts on a big chart. Then we organized these facts onto our own “have, can, are’ papers and highlighted 3 favorite facts before writing them down and drawing pictures in our  All About Chickens books. We added another page to our all about books this week – we added an ending page. We found a way to wrap up our topic on chickens. The kinders did an AMZING job working more and more independently!!  Enjoy having your kinder read their writing to you.  

FAIRY TALES—THE LITTLE RED HEN:  We read various versions of the  The Little Red Hen this week. The kinders used the Shape Go Map to help recalling details of the story.  The kinders practiced their retelling skills by using character cutouts and a setting that they drew onto a paper bag.  I hope that you ask them to sing the retelling song we learned as they retell the story to you this weekend.

READING: We learned that readers read everything they can about a topic by reading more than one book about the same topic. We used 2 books about insects to practice this.  After reading 2 books about ducks, we noticed facts that were similar and different.The kinders then tried to find similar and different facts in their 2 books.  The kinders fun playing a game  using non-fiction text features. We said, “Can you spy with your little eye…” and then gave a non-fiction text feature for our reading partner to look for in their topic books. We looked for things such as bold words, fancy words, photographs, labels, glossary. Finally, the kinders learned that readers can think about everything authors what them to learn about a topic. They had fun sharing some fun facts with friends.

LITERACY/PHONICS: We were busy working on these skills….

  • remove beginning sounds to make new words isn’t always one letter but sometimes two letters. You can add CH, SH, TH. (chip-ship)
  • listening for ending sounds
  • making words in the -ET family
  • reading a short story and answering comprehension questions
  • reading the story of The Little Red Hen and retelling it using the props we made

KOOL KINDER AND THE SURPRISE BAG AND THE GUESSING BAG:  The items this week were pom poms, marshmallows, mini chocolate chips and freeze dried Skittles.  We are having so much fun trying to guess the amount and are practicing making groups of ten and extra ones too.

REMINDERS

  • Bring 2 snacks each day to school and a water bottle with a spill proof lid please. Recently many kinders are “SOOOO HUNGRY” and are eating more than one snack in the a.m.  Often leading to “I need a snack” in the afternoon.  Growing kinders!  I do some extra snacks for just in case. Please be sure to have a conversation with your kinder about snacks.  I do make them eat what you send.  
  • Return take home books and library books on Wednesday
  • Watch the weather. Please keep in mind that even though the season is spring, some days will be cold, wet, rainy and maybe snowy :(.  Please continue to send a hat and mittens, along with a coat, with your kinder. Boots are not needed unless it snows or rains. Thanks! :)

UPCOMING DATES

*Monday, April 26—MUSIC;  Book orders due online or paper forms with check made out to Scholastic Book Clubs

*Tuesday, April 27—GYM

*Wednesday, April 28—ART; TAKE HOME BOOKS & LIBRARY Don’t forget your books! Thank you for taking the time to write comments about your kinder’s reading of their TAKE HOME books.  That is so helpful 🙂

*Thursday, April 29—STEAM 

*Friday, April 30–MUSIC

***Have a fabulous weekend. Mrs. Bohl

A Personal Celebration

Dear Kinder Families,

Sunday, April 11, was an exciting day for my personal family.  Mr. Bohl and I became grandparents (Oma and Opa) for the FOURTH TIME.  

Theodore Ketchum joined our family at 12:18am.  A precious 7 lbs 1 oz baby boy. We are so excited to have a boy in the family! :). He has 3 girls to watch over him (1 sister and 2 cousins)

Momma (my youngest daughter, Julia) is doing great and will be enjoying some time home before going back to be a PA (physician assistant).  Thank you for indulging me and letting me share.  Mrs. Bohl

News of the Week—April 12-16

POPCORN WORDS:   HIM. JUMP

WRITING:  We began the week by listing facts we knew about goats.  There were a lot of good facts.  Then we read informational books about goats to gather more facts.  The kinders incorporated these facts into their writing as they created another book of All About Goats using the format of Goats have _____.  Goats can ____.  Goats are ____. The kinders are doing a fantastic job with their informational writing.  They have made incredible progress this year in their writing. I am so proud of their hard work.

FAIRY TALES….THE THREE BILLY GOATS GRUFF:  Our fairy tale this week was about 3 brave goats who had courage to cross a bridge and deal with a bully, the troll. We read the original story and a few different versions of the fun fairy tale.  Again, we used the SHAPE GO map to help us retell the story, talk about the characters, setting and heart of the story. We discussed words that described the three goats and the troll.  This led into a good discussion about what we can do if we encounter a bully. We also had an awesome discussion about what makes a hero.  We thought the biggest billy goat was like a hero for saving his little brothers. We ended the week by having fun making our own trolls.

  

MATH:  We focused on number partners this week.  We completed pages inside of our math workbooks and played games. One game was called The Hiding Zero Game. This game focused on practicing teen numbers, each teen number is made by replacing the zero in the ten with a number that tells how many ones there are. For example, 14=10+4. Pigs in the Pen was another fun game.  Lay out 10 objects. One partner closes their eyes while the other partner removes some of the “pigs”. Open eyes and say “6 pigs in the pen.  How many more pigs to make ten?” (6+4=10) Lima Bean Shake was a third game we played.  We also reviewed sorting by completing a book called Bonkers for Buttons and actually sorting objects.

LITERACY/PHONICS: We worked on these skills….

  • letters that work together to make a single sound – we looked at the sound s makes, the sound h makes and then the sound they make when they are together (sh)
  • sorting pictures that start with s, h and sh
  • making words in the word family -UM
  • writing and reading CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant)
  • reading the story of The 3 Billy Goats Gruff and retelling it using the props we made

READING: We learned that non-fiction readers think of new words that they are learning and write them down. Readers sometimes need to be detectives and use clues on the whole page to figure out the meaning of words, reminding themselves to not read too fast so that you don’t miss important facts.

KOOL KINDER AND THE SURPRISE BAG AND THE GUESSING BAG:  The items this week were seashells and a stuffed lion. We also started a new activity for being the Kool Kinder.  Be on the lookout for the GUESSING BAG.  You will need to fill the GUESSING BAG with a number of the same objects (1-50).  Then the kinders will try to guess the number.  A fun way to practice estimating, number identification and making groups of 10 and extra ones.  So far we have tried to guess the number of cotton balls, mini marshmallows and chocolate chips.

BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS:  We celebrated 3 birthdays this week.  Thank you so much for the birthday gift treats!

REMINDERS

  • Bring 2 snacks each day to school and a water bottle with a spill proof lid please.
  • Return take home books and library books on Wednesday
  • Watch the weather. Please keep in mind that even though the season is spring, some days will be cold, wet, rainy and maybe snowy :(.  Please continue to send a hat and mittens, along with a coat, with your kinder. Boots are not needed unless it snows or rains. Thanks! :)
  • Change of clothes check.  Be sure to check the extra clothes baggy in your kinder’s backpack that they are season and size appropriate.  With spring weather, recess can sometimes get messy.

UPCOMING DATES

*Monday, April 19—MUSIC

*Tuesday, April 20—GYM

*Wednesday, April 21—ART; TAKE HOME BOOKS & LIBRARY Don’t forget your books! 

*Thursday, April 22—STEAM If your kinder would like a sack lunch from the lunch service, please email me or write a note by Thursday, 4/22

*Friday, April 23–EXTRA RECESS Fast Friday (Early Release) 12:15 p.m. Dismissal

***Have a wonderful weekend. Mrs. Bohl