Have a Holly Jolly Math Class...

It's the best time of the year for fun math lessons! 

Kindergarten students have been as busy as Santa's Elves in Mrs. Spofford's Math class!

They are learning about patterning and made a pattern tree. 

These aren't just pretty decorations.....They are combinations of 8! Check out the number sentences on the bottom!

Math Stations are where students get to practice being mathematicians independently.

Here are a few of our holiday favorites:

Race to 100 using the numbers 10-15 with fun Christmas characters.

Decorate a Christmas tree by identifying numbers and counting sets of ornaments.

More number combination fun with sets of 7!

Gardening News By Raeleigh

Check out what we've been up to in the garden this week.


Thanks Raeleigh for the awesome report!

Our Alphabet Linking Chart!

Kindergarten students have learned all about the Alphabet linking chart. This tool helps us remember our letters and sounds for reading and writing. You have probably seen it in you child's homework folder.

Each class worked very hard to make their own linking chart for the classroom.
Students learned how to write each letter using the correct steps then added them to the chart. They colored the linking chart pictures and wrote the words too.

We took a picture of our chart and made it interactive using iPads and a few cool apps. 
(Thing Link and Shadow Puppet)
Students learned to use the iPad camera tool and made a movie for each letter! Every student helped build a letter with materials found in our classroom and took a picture with the iPad. We also had fun searching for real objects to go with the letters.
(Except for Oo, we couldn't find an octopus at school.)

Just click or tap on each play button to see our work.

We Love Our Mommies!

To make Mother's Day extra special we. . .

Read books about Moms and talked about what makes OUR Mom's special.

We drew and labeled our Mommies.

We made Mommy coupons!

Watch the videos below to hear our sweet thoughts about our Mommies. 

Love You MOM!!!

Our Community

What do you know about Port Aransas? What makes our town special? What landforms are in our town? What jobs are in our community? What are maps?
These are just some of the questions students answered in our study of Port Aransas.

 Check out our interactive town map to see what else we learned.

Students really enjoyed using Goggle Earth to explore and take pictures of our town.

Student quotes about Google Earth:

"This is better than Mine Craft!"

"I'm totally getting this game when I get home!"

Kindergarten students did their own research with a partner to learn about our community workers. They reported their findings using their choice of apps from a menu.

We are also proud of our school community!

Easter Math

We have been working hard in math to learn the different combinations of numbers up to 10.  This week we focused on the number 10.  We practiced breaking 10 apart with manipulatives and then finished up the week with this Easter project.  We even wrote the number sentence to go with our combinations, just like the First Graders!!


This video was made using Pic Collage and Book Creator.

Day, Night, and Space

We have been very busy learning about day, night, and outer space.
Here are some of the highlights from the past few weeks.

We illustrated the day and night pattern.

We learned about the night sky.

We asked questions about the moon. Here is our Moon Padlet wall. 

Both classes added to the same wall to keep track of our learning.

Created with Padlet

We described the moon and the students helped write the sentences.

We painted the moon with special "moon paint" and added craters.

Each student wrote their own facts about the moon. Here are just a few. 

Check out the spaces between those words! Whoop!

Stop by our hallway to read the rest of our moon facts.

Flashlight moon phases and eating moon cookies were class favorites.

We learned about the sun and stars too.

We wrote our own sun facts.

We found constellations and the moon with the Sky View app. 

(It's a free app! Check it out!)

Here are the silly Storybot songs we learned about the Sun, Moon, and Earth

Finally, we compared day and night.
Each class chose a familiar tune and wrote a song about the day and night sky.

CVC Words and Padlet!

For the past few weeks we have been learning about CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. We know how to read them by saying each sound and blending them together. We also know how to write them by listening for a beginning, middle, and ending sound. These words teach our Kinder readers so much about words and how they work.

This week students participated in a CVC Word Mission. The challenge was to write or type as many CVC words as they could. They looked for words in books, in our stations, and made up their own by rhyming! We used a web site called Padlet with our iPads to enter words on our CVC wall. Using Padlet allowed us to keep our learning all in one place and see the words that were being entered by students from both classes in real time! The students who reached 25, 50, and 75 words earned a spelling badge. We had so much fun!


Check out our awesome word work!!! 

Created with Padlet

3 Dimensional Shapes

Can you name these 3D shapes?

Kindergarten can!

In math, students have been learning all about 3 dimensional shapes. Our Kinder mathematicians explored, described, sorted and named these shapes. They enjoyed going on 3D shape hunts around the school and singing groovy songs about them.  Here is a class chart they made to record their learning.

 To wrap up their study, students were invited to eat the 3D shapes!!! 

100th Day Fun!

This is a little late, but we had a blast on the 100th day of school. Everyone did a great job with their 100 collections.

Gingerbread Fun!

Check out our Gingerbread Movie!

Computer Science Education Week

Kindergarten loved participating in "The Hour of Code" for Computer Science Education Week. Thanks to our wonderful Tech Coordinator Mrs. Zigmond, teachers and students had a fun introduction to computer science.

Here is a video introducing the Hour of Code.

We used an app called Kodable and went to code.org to practicing our programming skills.

Students used arrow blocks to make the Angry Bird move to the pig.

Garden Snack

Garden Snack

We harvested green beans and snap peas from the garden! Yesterday, our garden volunteers Linda Zahn, Marsha Smith, and Julie Findley brought the green beans back for students to try.  Most students are eager to try vegetables from our garden.  But we have Freddy the Fearless Food Frog who helps those who are afraid to try new things.  Freddy is a magic frog from our previous garden expert Dr. John Fucik. All you have to do is hold Freddy and you will be ready to try new food! He really comes in handy!!!

Our Garden volunteers also taught us how to shuck the snap peas. Here is a Flipagram of all the fun.

Students gave the green beans an approving thumbs up and even asked for seconds and thirds!!!

Mental Images

Kindergarten has been learning about mental images. Good readers create mental images or pictures in their minds as they read. We started by closing our eyes and listening to outside sounds from a CD and picturing what the sounds reminded us of. Then we practiced making mental images with short poems. We noticed our mental images are not all the same because our schema or background knowledge is different.  Here is a Flipagram of our mental images for the poem, Green Giant By Jack Prelutsky. I love all of the details our Kinder learners added to their Giant's!

Our New Garden Book!

The Kinder Kiddos have been working hard with Mrs. Findley and our garden volunteers. They have been busy planting all kinds of vegetables and learning new garden vocabulary.
We used the Book Creator App to show off some of this new learning.
First we created a predictable chart with the words, "We see _______ in the garden." Students then had to think of something that they have seen and we added it to the chart. I am so impressed with all of the big vocabulary words they are already using from this hands on experience!
Enjoy!

Back to Kindergarten!

It's always overwhelming to get your room back in shape. I have a lot to do!! Luckily I have two energetic helpers to make the job easier. 

New Blog!!! Yippeeee

My first post on my new blog!!