Day 1. Lots of fun!

Welcome to Kinder Class

To give a little background about me...I love teaching!  I taught high school chemistry for five years (one of those included physics too).  While teaching high school, I was the MESA (math engineering and science for minorities) mentor and coached the volleyball team.  I also wrote chemistry curriculum for the Jordan District website.  During the summers I worked as a facilitator for the Quantum Learning Company.  They research the best way the brain works and we teach this to the youth and their parents.  One of the camps I lead was at Stanford so I like to say I taught at Stanford  I love the outdoors, hiking, skiing (snow and water), running, refinishing furniture, playing and teaching piano, singing, being a mom and wife, reading, setting goals, and teaching.  This will be my third year teaching kinders and I could not be more excited!!  I have four darling kiddos that make my life very complete.  This kiddo to the left is my son Parks, and he will be with me every day on this adventure!







 Please feel free to copy my ideas or share yours with me this year!  Here is the outline of my class:

Tuesdays

-Choice Time.  I have a lot of manipulatives the kids can play with and with each other to start class.  I will be working with individual kids at this time on their Reading Lesson book...a couple pages a day.

-Circle Time.  Here we will sing, do class shares, a class memorization piece, and practice some sight words.

-Literature.  We will read our story

-Social Studies.  This will be based on the story. 

-Handwriting Without Tears.  1 page every Tuesday

-PE.

-Math. 

-Music.  I have an elderly widow friend that is a retired elementary teacher and would love to come sing songs with the kids on occasion with us.

-Act of Service.  This will be once a month.  We will bring different people from the community.  For example, we will bring in someone from Meals on Wheels to give them some place mats we'll make again this year so the elderly can eat on some seasonal place mats the kids will make.

-Run a Business.  We will be making items like healthy smoothies and some snacks to sell to other classes and teachers.  We will be learning about money/math on a basic level.

Thursdays

-Choice time and individual Reading Lesson

-Circle Time

-Literature

-Language Arts

-Journal

-Science Experiment

-Reading Time.  Students are welcome to bring books every day that match the theme (or just ones that they like).

-Yoga and Meditation.  We will do this around once a month

-Spanish Intro.  We be singing and doing some fun activities to introduce them to Spanish

-Sports.  We will be moving class time to the open "warehouse" area where we can spread out and play more.  For this section, I'm thinking of how if you took your child to a soccer class or kickball class, that is what this time would look like. 

-Play Practice.  Throughout the year we'll do some little plays for each other and little fun mini performances with the the help of my student aids.

The three books I'll be using for my curriculum:
Handwriting without Tears
The Reading Lesson:  Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Easy Lessons
Five In A Row by Jane Claire Lambert
We will also be using a journal where half is blank so they can draw pictures.

Welcome Lesson Tuesday
Choice Time.  I found some all sorts of fun and different types of blocks this summer at garage sales to add to our choice time.  The kids loved them!

Circle Time.  The kids brought a stuffed animal with them.  We always start with the Hokey Pokey and this week we did it with our play buddies.  The kids had the opportunity to introduce themselves to the class and share a toy that they like to play with too.  During this time we will do a class share, songs, stories, class memorization, sight words, check and talk about the weather, and do some class nursery rhymes.  We read a giant sized version of "The Little Engine that Could" and the kids loooved it! 

Math.  We marched and moved while we counted to 100.  For one hour of our class, we get the whole warehouse to ourselves so we have lots of room to play.

Art.  We drew the kids' names (I have some amazing helpers this year) on colored paper.  They put stickers or cut out pictures from a magazine to stick right on top of their name.  They turned out so cool.  This where I first got the idea.







Here's how ours turned out:

 

 

 

Game.  We played a game where the kids would say their own name and then that of the person they threw the ball to so they could get to know each other.

Review.  We went on a bear hunt and then talked about what we did today.  It was a great first day and a gentle step into our normal procedures.


Welcome Lesson Thursday
Science Experiment.  We talked about chemical reactions today...what they are and how we can tell they occurred.  We did the Mentos/Diet Coke explosion.  The kids loved it.  We talked about bubbles, sounds, and how the diet coke and mentos changed to form a new substance.


Yoga.  We introduced yoga to the new kiddos.  We do poses and say little chants that go with them:  while doing tree pose we say "I am friendly", warrior pose-"I am strong" in a very strong voice! etc.

We also did some animal poses.

Spanish.  I downloaded some Spanish songs to show the kids that we'll be learning.  We sang them in English first.

Sports.  We had the kids line up and do a catching drill.  It's hard for little kids to throw underhand so we practiced that today.  We also played Red Rover.

Review.  We went on a horse race to end class and review our day.