Wonderopolis

What a great little family site I just found! It is called Wonderopolis and I have added it to the sidebar on this blog. This is the way they describe themselves...
Create. Laugh. Imagine. Explore. Learn. Smile. Grow.
Visit Wonderopolis.™ It’s a place where parents seek and nurture a brighter world for their children through the power of discovery, creativity, learning and imagination. Wonderopolis™ is brought to life by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL).
Everyday,a new wonder will be presented like...
Do horses sleep standing up?
Why do onions make us cry?
Why do we eat turkey on Thanksgiving?
These are great conversation starters for the classroom or the supper table. I look forward to using them in the classroom to promote oral language and of course to encourage those fantastic little imaginations. I am excited about the potential of this site in our classroom, thanks Wonderopolis.

A fun little site...

Honestly, my favorite smell in the world is Crayola crayons. So, anytime Crayola comes out with a new kid friendly site, I am interested. Click here to visit Crayola's Coloring Page Maker. I have also added it to the sidebar under "Links for Little Ones."
Crayola Digi-Maker is worth a visit also. Thanks to Richard Byrne of Free Tech for Teachers for these little nuggets.

A little something to ponder....

Our children are online. That is something that is happening and is not going to go away. I ran across this video called "Guiding our Students on the Internet," as part of a webinar I am taking on Social Media use as a teacher. This course includes tools such as twitter, delicious and diigo (social bookmarking), google reader (RSS), and google docs just to name a few. I feel that if we as teachers are not lifelong learners, we cannot help to instill that in our students. As the only Kindergarten teacher in our school, I do not have others who do what I do, through social media and especially twitter, I have been able to create a professional learning community of Kindergarten teachers and other teaching professionals who help keep me motivated, inspired and learning. As you watch the above video, can you answer the question, who is driving the car at your house?

Image: A Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from impactmatt's photostream

The Annual Kindergarten Poppy Count....

It all started last Thursday after reading A Poppy is to Remember we grabbed the clipboards, our Canadian Flags and headed for the office to use our recycled juice box money to buy poppies. We were collecting data, we needed to find out who was wearing a poppy in our school.

Well, I have to tell you, the results were dismal. We found only 7 poppies in our whole K-12 school. We were disappointed and some classes got a "big, fat zero!" We told them we would be back on the following Tuesday and we expected better!
So today was the day, would we find more poppies or be disappointed yet again? Let me tell you, we were not disappointed! We found 127 poppies and the Grade 12's and Grade 3's had a full class of poppies, we gave them each three cheers for their good work. So, if you see a Kindergarten kid from our school coming, you better find a poppy, because we are on the look out!
Look at our data collection:


And here is our Remembrance Day Craft that we whipped up:

Just check us out!

Look at our very first voicethread! This was a huge project. We started by partnering up and then just visiting. We needed to find out what each of our partners is good at. After this we recorded it in a prediction chart sort of way. We then needed to take pictures of our partners. This was the first time using a digital camera for some of our students. After quickly uploading our pictures to a voicethread, we made our comments. These are the comments that are directly from our predictable chart. I think we did pretty darn good for our first time. They loved hearing their voices on the voicethread and each got a big smile.

Coming up this week...

I just can't wait to see what ole Frank Lemon and his mule Jenny are up to tomorrow! We will be jumping into that Science Alberta crate and doing more math/science activities. I have uploaded a voicethread for you to watch with your child. These are some of the animals that Frank found in his camp, these are all animals that live right here in Alberta. Can you identify them all? The kids and I will be learning about them and we will be making comments about what we know now and later we will also comment on what we continue to learn about these Alberta animals. This is the beginning of an ongoing project.