Snow Day! (Updates, Jan Brett, St. Patty's, and Lent)

Well, hey there. I guess I'm not too great at this blogging thing, but seeing as we FINALLY got a Snow Day today (first one in 2 years!), I thought I'd stop by and show you what we've been up to in 2013!

We have been busy this winter in afternoon kindergarten! Here's what we've been doing:

We learned about snowflakes and how each one is unique and special - just like each of us! We made two different kinds of snowflakes: one using foam cutouts and glitter glue and the other, using a paper template, glue, and glitter. I think we can take these down now that we've gotten our snow day!

We made a class mural for open house. I found the kid clip art on TpT (free!) and had each child select a picture that resembled him/her and color it in. Then I outlined a mural, and each kid got to paint a different section. The word bubbles have the reason that each child said they love St. Jude! We got a lot of compliments during Open House on this.

I share a birthday with one of my students, which was very fun! He made me cookies, and we celebrated together. We are exactly 20 years apart. :)

We had a beautiful 70 degree day at the end of January, and the kids were thrilled to be outside in short sleeves! (I may have been even more thrilled than they were... Unfortunately, I think the groundhog lied, seeing as how it's now March, and we have a snow day...)

Here are some of our Valentine activities:

Sorting and counting Valentine's M&M's. We also created patterns from the different colors. And yes, they got to eat the M&M's when we finished!

We made Valentine's Messages in a Bottle (found here on Pinterest). The kids chose people to receive their messages, and we included Valentine's M&M's in place of sand/seashells. We even made a secret delivery to an older sister's classroom on Valentine's Day!

We estimated how many candy hearts would fit onto a picture of a larger heart, then counted to see how close our guesses were.

 We worked in pairs to sort candy hearts by color and individually graph our results.

President's Day: We made the cutest reversible George Washington's and Abe Lincoln's. One side of the craft is Washington's face and coat, and the other side is Lincoln's face and top hat. I found this craft here and adapted it for our needs.

We have still been making plenty of time for play!

A sunny and cold day earlier this week afforded us some play time outside. Here, the girls became fascinated with a sewer on the playground. You don't know fun until you've dropped sticks (and Cheetos found on the ground - ew) into a sewer!

These awesome Melissa & Doug toys had been in the Staff Room for months, until I was encouraged to bring them downstairs. The kids love to mix the train and bus with our jungle animals set. The jungle animals have traveled to some exotic locales!

 Dramatic play fun with some of the dollhouse toys!

We have also been studying Jan Brett, one of my favorite authors and illustrators. My kids went to the school library on Monday, and almost every one of them checked out a book by Jan Brett, completely unprompted by me! I love that! We're going to continue our author study next week with Tomie DePaola, followed by Eric Carle and Chris VanAllsburg. If you have any other kindergarten-appropriate suggestions, please let me know! The kids are creating their own author study book, where they record their favorite book by each other, a reason for liking the book, and a picture to illustrate the book. I think this will be a great kindergarten keepsake and hopefully, will help their parents select library books over the summer months.

Also up next on the agenda: St. Patrick's Day! I think we're going to sponge paint shamrocks. We've been out of green paint since we created the mural for Open House (see above), and rather than grabbing some more from the supply room, I think we'll do a quick color mixing lesson, and I'll let each child mix his/her own ratio of blue and yellow to create a unique green color. I think this will make the shamrocks even cuter on our windows!

As we're a Catholic school, we have also been learning about Lent, Easter, and the story of the Cross. I will check back in later this week or next week (no, really, I PROMISE) to show you a beautiful book I found that describes the Stations of the Cross in a child-appropriate way. We also made "stained glass" crosses (see picture on right). I need to take a picture of the finished crosses in the window. They are beautiful! If you're a Catholic school teacher, what have you been doing to teach your students the importance of Lent and preparing for Easter?