Christmas Play 2017

Each year, my Kindergarten class performs a Nativity play for the Kindergarten families. Here are some pictures from this year's play.

We made luminaries to line the walkway to the school entrance. I use a Ziploc bag filled with sand and a battery operated tea light inside the bag. At the end of the night the bag is soggy, but I can reuse the sand and tea light each year.

 The kids made ornaments to hang on the tree. 

One side of the ornament has a Nativity picture and the other side has a picture of the student in their costume for the play. 

I made programs with the order of songs for the play and pictures of each child in their costumes. 

The students also made candy cane Js out of Model Magic and we tied them to a poem I found about the Legend of the Candy Cane. This year the students also made Rudolph ornaments for their Christmas tree.

This is a beautiful Nativity Set that we set up in the back of the hall each year.

This is a beautiful tapestry that was made for our preschool. We put it up in the back of the hall each year next to the Nativity set.

The Kindergarten room mom set up refreshments in the back of the hall.

This is a view of the hall.

I borrowed this stable painting from the Preschool. It is so cute!

This is Bethlehem town. I made this out of paper.

Here are my Kinders all dressed up. I made most of the costumes seen here. I got a white dress from a second hand store for the angel costume. 

I got the star costume from Oriental Trading.

It was a wonderful night.

All Saints' Day

Wow! It has been a busy year and I have not had time to post to my blog since September! On All Saints' Day the kids did Saints presentations. Each student chose a Saint to learn about and came to school dressed up like the Saint they chose. The kids told their classmates about the Saint they chose. After lunch we all walked to our parish Church and went to mass. Then we came back to school and had an all school dance. It was so much fun! 

 We also did a Saint craft. 

We had a wonderful day!

Greater Than, Less Than, Equal To

Over the last four weeks, the Kindergarten students have been working on counting objects, making groups of objects, and addition. Yesterday, we started talking about greater than, less than, and equal to. Our theme for September is Apples so I used a line drawing of an apple tree and red pompoms (to represent apples) for this activity.

We started off by making two groups on the apple tree.

Then, students pointed to the group that was greater.

Next, the students pointed to the group that had less apples.

We talked about what equal means and I showed the students a few examples on the apple tree.

Finally, they counted the apples and found out how many apples there were all together.

Math Fun

It has been a busy start of the school year. Here are some things we did in math this week. We have been working on our one to one correspondence. The students wrote a number on their whiteboards and then they drew that number of circles on their whiteboard.

We also made AB patters with apple cutouts. 

Some kids even made ABC patterns with the cutouts.

Today, we made AB patterns with stickers.

This week we also practiced making groups and then seeing how many we have altogether (We are starting to add!).

She made a group of three and another group of three. There are six altogether.

He made a group of four and a group of two. There are six altogether.

She made a group of six and a group of zero. She used her hand as a placeholder for zero.  There are six altogether.

We had a lot of fun with math this week.

More summer fun

I am a Kindergarten teacher and I also direct the middle school girls choir at my school. I have sung in choirs since second grade and I love singing. I have a strong background in music. Until last school year, I had never conducted a choir before. Near the end of the school, year my principal asked me to direct the choir for the following year and so I started looking for professional development relating to choir conducting. I was lucky enough to find the Summer Choral Conducting Workshop presented by Dr. Walders and the San Diego Pro Arte Voices. It was an AWESOME experience. It reminded me of things I had forgotten and made me much more confident about being a conductor. 

This summer I went to the Choral Conducting Workshop again to learn even more. It was so much fun. 

The workshop was 30 hours spread out over two and a half days. It was a busy few days, but it was a lot of fun.

What do you do with old crayon pieces?

At the end of the year there are always pieces of crayons left over. I use the old crayons to make new shape crayons. Fill 8oz measuring cups with crayons. Put them on a cookie sheet to prevent spilling the wax all over. Put them in the oven at 375 degrees fahrenheit for 35 minutes.

Remove the crayons from the oven and let them cool to 160 degrees fahrenheit. 

Stir the melted crayons before you pour them into the candy molds.

Pour the melted crayons into the candy molds and let cool. When they are solid, put the molds into the freezer for five minutes. Then, take the candy molds out of the freezer and turn them over on the counter. The crayons will fall right out. 

Here are the finished crayons.

They are so much fun to make and use. I am going to make welcome to school bags with the crayons in them.

Classroom Update

Last Friday, I went up to school to work for a little while and I was pleasantly surprised to find that my bulletin boards were painted and my floor was waxed. Our facilities manager and his assistant did an awesome job on my room. They touched up the paint on the wood work too. 

This is what my room looked like when I got to school.

 Here is the front of the room.

I got to work putting up boarders in the bathrooms. I am hoping to find some cute woodland creature wall decals.

I started putting boarders on all of my bulletin boards.

Here is my room at the end of the day.

Here is the writing wall in the back of the room.

I have more to do, but it is a good start.