Spring Brings...

We experimented with colors for St. Patrick's Day. I spread out papers and non traditional painting supplies )Q-tips, pipe cleaners, sponges, beans, straws...) and squirted blue and yellow paint on the papers. We experimented to see what would happen when we mixed them together...they were SO excited when it turned into green!

h
t


Painting our Shamrock Shakers! These are sitting on the bookshelves in the school entrance please take these home! :)Sophia's Trap
Cooper's Trap
We never found the pot of god at the end of the rainbow, but we sure did enjoy these rainbow cupcakes! They turned out so cute, they were pretty easy to make...and they tasted great too!

We have had a busy couple of weeks in the Dinosaur class. We've learned about manners and about growing up, we have learned about the colors of the rainbow and what types of things happen in spring, we have tried to catch a leprechaun and been left with a huge glittery mess! It has been so much fun!

Today in class we made books titled "Spring Brings..." We read these books several times in class and everyone was SO excited that they were reading all by themselves, here are a few videos of your eager readers...aren't they precious?



Due to an unfortunate misunderstanding I will be leaving Curtis' Kindergarten sooner than anticipated. I was planning on teaching through the summer, Mrs. Wendy thought I was only here until the summer, so she hired a new teacher to take my place. When we figured out we had gotten our lines crossed it was too late. I had to start looking for a job for the summer, when I found a job they said they could not hold it for me until the summer so I have to start immediately. April 9th will be my last day as the Dinosaurs teacher, I will tell the class on Monday.I am SO sad to leave, I wish I could stay with your kids as long as they are here, I love them so much! I really do feel so blessed to have grown to know and love your kids! I wish that I could stay, but unfortunately it just isn't going to be able to happen. Your kids are SO full of love I know that they will do great with their new teacher! I will still be in Searcy, so hopefully I will see you around town often, and I am sometimes available for babysiting and tutoring!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

We celebrated Dr. Seuss' birthday last week and it was a blast! Thank you so much to everyone who brought books and movies for us, we really had a great time learning about Dr. Seuss!
We made hats on "Cat in the Hat" day. They were precious!

On Wednesday we all wore green! We read "Green Eggs and Ham" and then ate green eggs and ham for snack with a cup of green milk! We also read "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" in class and made green slime!





Dr. Seuss week was so much fun! We are learning about the letter W this week and going to be talking about growing up. If you have pictures of your child when they were a baby or toddler that you would like to send in we are going to be talking about how much we have grown and it would be neat to be able to compare ourselves now to what we looked like when we were younger!

Parent teacher conferences are next week. This is actually a very important conference because we will be discussing kindergarten readiness. I will have your child's Curtis Kindergarten portfolio at the conference and I will be ready to discuss strengths and weaknesses and what your individual child needs before starting kindergarten, if you have anything you would like to bring to the conference that is fine. I am really excited to get to talk to each of you! I have scheduled each conference for 20 minutes, if you anticipate needing longer than that please let me know in advance so that I can adjust the schedule. My conference schedule is posted on our class board by the hooks, please sign up for a time by this Friday (3/12) so that I will have everything ready and prepared for your conference. If you are not available at any of the posted times please contact me A.S.A.P, we are required to meet together before March 18th so we will need to work something out as quickly as possible. I can't wait to get to tell you how amazing your kids are at school!

Announcements

Well the past couple of weeks have been a little hectic with snow days and my trip out of town and our Valentine's party...but things are settling down to a normal pace again, thank goodness!

Just a few announcements, we are having a teddy bear picnic during our snack time on Friday for the letter "T", depending on the weather it will more than likely be a picnic on a blanket inside, but it will still be something fun and different. I will bring drinks and crackers, but if you would like to you could send your child's favorite flavor of teddy ghrams and we will munch on those and they can of course bring their favorite teddy bear or stuffed animal!

Next week is Dr. Seuss' birthday, we will have a week long celebration we will read a ton of Dr. Seuss books: The Cat in the Hat, There's a Wocket in my Pocket, Horton Hears a Who, Green Eggs and Ham, Fox in Socks and several others. All of the teachers in our building are celebrating Dr. Seuss this week so we are having to share our books since we only have one copy of each, so if you have any Dr. Seuss books that you would be willing to let our class borrow for the week it would be GREATLY appreciated!

We will be reading Fox in Socks on Tuesday and everyone is asked to wear silly/crazy socks! We will take our shoes off when we are in the classroom and play in just our silly socks!

On Friday to end our birthday celebration of Dr. Seuss we will be reading and watching Horton Hears a Who, does anyone have a copy of the movie that we could borrow?

We have lots of fun exciting things coming up soon! Thanks so much for all of your involvement!

Our activities next week involve a lot of supplies, I have already started gathering some of them, but here are some things we still need, if you have any of these things and are willing to bring them that would be great! Oh, and don't worry, I will take lots of pictures next week!

Wish List:
Dr. Seuss books
Horton Hears Who movie
Sliced strawberries
Vanilla Wafers
Large pink pom-pom balls
Diced Ham (for green eggs and ham)

Pajama Day!

Today was our review week "Slumber Party!" We started the morning with Pop-corn and Peter Pan for the letter "P" and ended up having a "Slumber Party" for the letter "S." Next week we will be back to our normal schedule with the letter "T" and be on the look out for a Teddy Bear Picnic soon to come!

We are getting excited for our Valentine's party (Wed. 2/17 at 8:30!) We have been hard at work making Valentine's decorations, we can't wait for you to get to see them!

We have had a bast in the Dinosaur class! Although I think temperature changes have been putting everyone a little under the weather. Our numbers have been pretty low. We have really missed all of our sniffly dinos, but we have had a good chance to review some of our skills with the ones that have been here. One thing we still need to work on are shapes. Most everyone knows their shapes, but we are having a hard time distinguishing shapes when they are right next to each other (especially squares and rectangles) So if you see shapes around the house point them out and work on them together to reinforce that these shapes are everywhere. In class we have been playing wth magnetic shapes.... they have had a ball...sphere...or circle, whatever you want to call it :)

The weathe channel said we would have a few days of rain and thunderstorms so we took an extra long recess this morning. It is so nice to be able to play outside!!!

I LOVED Eliza's Arkansas Razorback outfit today! The tutu is just too cute!

Carson was all bundles up and SO excited about his hat. What a cutie!

So during recess we had a big game of CK football. It was pretty intense. This is the halftime huddle...we had to review the rules before the next half!

The game was hysterical all around, but I just could not get over Eliza playing football with the boys in her tutu! Precious!

We have had a wonderful Wednesday together! We are still learning about the letter "Q" now that is a tough one! When we brainstormed words that started with "P" we could easily get to 30... we are struggling to think of 3 good "Q" words, and I don't blame them, it's a tricky one!

Well here is our class...most of us anyways, we had a few absent :( We miss you when you aren't here! After our bible story we colored a picture together.
Today we talked about Queen Esther and how brave she was- she did the right thing even when it was scary! We talked about how we could do the right thing too, even when it was hard to do.
This is our "Jungle Sand" box. It is colored rice and jungle animals, so easy, but they LOVE it.
(Put rice in a sturdy ziplock bag and add rubbing alcohol and food coloring. Squish it around and let it sit for awhile. Then set out to dry and voila! Really fun toy...although it is pretty chalky, we have to clean up our "dusty" fingers after playing with it...any suggestions?)
Boys and their tinker toys. Seriously this is the #1 played with toy in the whole classroom. Every single one of them love to play with the tinker toys... I love to see what they "invent." Of course the boys always want to make weapons...bows and arrows, swords... they aren't allowed to play with weapons so they get creative... water guns, ice cream shooters, flashlights, microphones... it's a party in a box!
I couldn't get thins picture to load flipped correctly *sigh* oh well, this is our class going on a bear hunt with Mrs. Wendy!
Wednesdays are exciting days in our class. After Lunch we give Shelley (our class hermit crab) a bath, and then we have reading time with Mrs. Wendy. We love Wednesdays!

Our Class Blog

I know this doesn't look like much now, but I really will use this a lot as the year goes on! These first few weeks have been a big time of transition-for EVERYONE! The little building became the baby building, we got a whole new building for the "little building" kids, and our poor big building kids had to share with everyone in the time in between!

I am so thankful that I knew several of the "dinosaurs" before I came in, it made it easier on everyone not having a total stranger teaching their class! Over the past 2 weeks I feel like I have really gotten to know my class (Including our three new dinosaurs, welcome Carson, Sophia G. and Christian!) We have really had a great time getting to know each other and I am already in love with each and every one of your kids!

I have spent the past week trying to assess each child in my class to see what their strengths and weaknesses are so that I can get a good feel for the things we need to be doing in class, but you, the parents, are the real experts and I want you to feel free to give me any input as to things that you want us to work on (you guys know what your kids strengths and weaknesses are, and my goal is to give everyone a good start into Pre-K 4 next year) But most importantly, we are going to have fun, when you are 4 years old isn't that what you would want your teacher to want to do? I know I sure would!

I am pretty "techy", my husband is an IT guy and he has my classroom all set up for me so I bring my digital camera to school with me at least once a week and take pictures of our class. I put them on the digital frame on my desk (you're welcome to check it out anytime) the kids LOVE seeing their pictures up in the room like that. I will also post pictures on here a lot, I usually bring my laptop to school so that I will be able to post during naptime. Feedback is always appreciated, there isn't much incentive to put a lot on here if I think i'm just writing to myself! haha!

I hope you enjoy having this as a way of communication, and getting to see what your child's day is like here with the dinosaurs!

Mrs. Jamie