Welcome to K5B

It has been a great month in K5B as scholars continue to work hard and grow in amazing ways. We are reading, writing, and sharpening our mathematician skills each day. Scholars are also working hard to learn and practice kindness. We even got to celebrate our kind actions with a pizza party for completing our kindness challenge! Way to go scholars. In social studies scholars are learning all about Maps. They are learning that we live in the city of Milwaukee, in the state of Wisconsin, and in the United States. They are learning that all of these places are a part of the world! Some amazing work is being done! With a week and a half until Thanksgiving break we will continue to write, read, and talk about thanksgiving and being thankful for the people and things God blessed us with!

Our first Field trip was a huge success! The farm was fun filled with lots of activities for us to do! We went through a corn maze, pet lots of animals (some friends even fed them), picked pumpkins, and ate an efficient lunch in a barn together :). We really liked the llama and the bird with the crazy neck! Most scholars passed out on the bus and everyone was very excited to compare pumpkins and discuss farm experiences when we returned to school. The weather could not have been better and everyone was so well behaved. SNC was represented well today with our college ready scholars. Way to go K5B!

We are off to an amazingly strong start in the St.Norbert College K5 classroom! Scholars are hard at work reading, writing, and becoming mathematicians. We have been practicing so many routines and procedures such as FLYing in the hallway, working through centers, using problem solving strategies, and unpacking/packing up our backpacks. We will continue to practice and become masters of K5. Scholars are working so hard reviewing and learning letters and letter sounds as well as the 3 ways to read (the words, pictures, or by retelling a story). We have built our reading stamina to a whole 8 minutes, PHENOMENAL progress. Scholars are also learning all about manipulatives in math so they can use them to become better mathematicians and mathematical thinkers. Way to go scholars. I look forward to many more successful learning and work filled weeks in K5B! Please enjoy our first of many class pics (minus a Ryley who we missed on Thursday).

K5B had a great Valentines Day! We started our day with a prayer service all about St.Valentine. Scholars sang and prayed their hearts out. What a positive way to start the day. We also celebrated our Saints for success for December and Janurary. Congrats to Ayden (Joy) and Kennedy (Faith). We had some time together in the classroom next. We did some sight word songs and activities and read a Valentine's day book about kindness and accepting everyone, no matter who you are. Scholars had music and art today. After some math we ended our day with a Valentine's Day celebration. Scholars got to share their creative boxes/bags and pass out notes and treats to their classmates. Ending with a group hug, all feeling the love today. :) Happy Valentine's Day to all. Enjoy your extended weekend. 

We had an awesome adventure filled trip to the Urban Ecology Center this afternoon. Scholars had a great time and burned off a lot of energy playing in nature's playground. They climbed on tree branches and discovered wild life on our nature hike, got to learn about and see lots of animals, went down a super cool slide, and learned about ice and winter in nature. They should all sleep well tonight :) 

Happy Thanksgiving K5B! This past week and a half leading up to thanksgiving K5B spent lots of time being grateful, talking about our blessings, and about thanksgiving. We wrote about what we would do if we were the turkey on Thanksgiving day! We also spent some time sharing what we were thankful for and what everyone's plans were for thanksgiving and our 5 days off of school! We read a book about a Thanksgiving play, drew turkeys with specific numbers of feathers and spelled our sight words using turkey feathers! We even hid a turkey under different shapes and had to find where it was and describe the shape that was hiding it. K5B has been hard at work. Our last activity that was thanksgiving related was right before break began on Tuesday. We cut and pasted feathers and an outline of a turkey onto paper to make our own turkeys! We wrote on each feather something we were thankful for! Enjoy your days off and I cannot wait for an exciting Christmas and advent season with K5B! I am so thankful for our Catholic East community and for each one of my K5B scholars. 

 Happy Halloween!!

Yesterday we spent our morning rotating around the school in different groups filled with scholars from each class in the school. Scholars had the chance to participate in activities in each classroom with each teacher at Holy Rosary. In the afternoon K5A and K5B combined for some fun Halloween games including pin the stem on the pumpkin, candy corn relay races, musical chairs, and some candy/Halloween snacks to end the day. Below I have put a brief description of what went down in each classroom/at each rotation. I have also attached some photos from the fun filled day. 

Science: Scholars explored sensory bins with Halloween themes. 

ELA: Scholars listened to the book "Turkey Trick or Treat", talked about costumes in the book and in the room, drew pictures of their costumes. 

Movie: Watched Halloween themed movies. 

Art: Scholars made el dia de los muertos skeletons (the symbol of the day of the dead holiday. 

Math: Scholars measured how many pumpkins tall they were with paper pumpkins. They got to draw pictures of themselves next to the pumpkins and color some pumpkins. 

Music/Movement: Danced along to Just Dance and Go Noodle Halloween Songs. 

Friday was our first field trip as a class and it went so well! We all had lots of fun at Green Meadows Farm. Scholars got to have many adventures with Farmer Tammy and the other Catholic East Scholars. They rode a school bus and ponies, ate a picnic lunch in a barn, went on a hay ride, picked up and touched chickens, and of course, picked pumpkins! The smiles on their faces through it all were priceless. They were very well behaved and were also super engaged. 

September was a fast paced and wonderful month! We hit the ground running, or should I say learning! The scholars are doing a fantastic job and are already growing so much. I can honestly say I look forward to seeing each of their smiling faces each and every day.

We have been learning so many fun things. In ELA we are learning how to read, write, and spell while we rotate through our Daily 5 literacy stations. We just wrapped up our text features unit where scholars worked hard to identify labels, bold words, captions, and photographs. We read lots of books with these text features and the scholars created their own to help remember what each text feature does. Next week we are going to start our Guided Reading groups.In Math we are working very hard at counting and writing to 5. Scholars are getting better and faster everyday. This month we have had the chance to do lots of fun science and religion activities such as making our own bibles, learning about the Holy Spirit, and working on our 5 senses and science experiments. 

I am very proud of our scholars for how well they did on their MAP tests! The focus and attention of these 5 year olds as they tested was amazing to watch. They rocked it! You will be updated on results soon. Teachers are going to be looking over results and processing what they mean once all scholars are done testing. We have also met with our 4th grade buddies and they are all becoming fast friends. This month scholars partnered with their 4th graders to draw and color fall pictures. 

Stay tuned for our next set of adventures. 

Week 1 was a success for all in K5B. We learned a lot about procedures, dove into reading, went through some math rotations, and created rules we think will make a great environment to learn and grow in. Getting to know my new scholars has been so fun. I already feel like we have our own little family. We have some pretty sweet scholars. In Math we learned all about how we treat our materials and how we work together to learn while we rotate through math centers. We also talked about turn and talk partners and made a list of what turning and talking to each other about math looks like. In Daily 5 (our literacy block) we learned about respectfully reading to ourselves. Scholars were able to read to themselves in a quiet spot (that they pick for themselves) in a whisper read voice. By the end of the week all of our hard work paid off and scholars read 3 minutes to themselves! We will be continuing to add minutes to our time and before we know it, K5B will be full of outstanding readers! Scholars know that even if they do not know how to read all of the words of a book yet, they can read a book by looking at the pictures, memorizing stories they know, or trying their best with the words they do know. On Friday we had a special treat! Our morning assembly ended with a Luau. We learned to hula from a K5A mom and got to wear lei! The children did a great job hula dancing and getting excited to take MAP tests at the end of the month! 

I cannot wait for another week of fun filled learning with your amazing scholars. Go Eagles!  

Our Friday Festivities :) 

Welcome to our classroom blog.  Check in often for a sneak peek into the happenings in K5B!