Mrs.Durocher's Kindergarten Class

Memorial's Marco's Pizza fundraiser night is coming up on March 4th.  Our kindergartners have been working hard to create their own personal pizza box.  If their parents order pizza from Marco's next Wednesday, they can have their pizza delivered in their child's personalized pizza box.  Each student colored his own pizza design and letters and then we stamped pepperonis and mushrooms on top!  They turned out so cute!

We have spent a lot of time this week talking about how to properly take care of our teeth.  We have done a lot of fun activities to reinforce what we have learned.  We read two books for shared reading, Dr. DeSoto and Little Rabbit's Loose Tooth.  We created a graph of our toothbrush colors (pink was the most popular!) and we counted cavities in one of our centers this week, too.  The activity that the kids have enjoyed most though, is brushing the teeth model with the big GIANT toothbrush.  We talked about how to brush, where to brush and what to brush.  Then each student had a chance to practice with the big teeth and toothbrush.

We have been learning all about Dental health for the past week or so.  The kids made some really awesome toothbrushes last week.  We created the color dots with bingo markers and the poem is a little song to the tune of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."

We have been learning a lot about US coins lately.  Here, at one of our learning centers, Destiny is shining pennies in a salt and vinegar solution.

Our Valentine's Day party was a blast.  We had so many parents share the experience with us and it was a lot of fun for everyone!  It wasn't just about the valentine's and candy though...we also had a lot of fun with our candy conversation hearts. 

We sorted them by color and then graphed the colors that were in our box.

We created a graph to show the number of letters on a conversation heart.

We estimated and then counted how many hearts we could hold in one hand. (can you tell we just celebrated the hundredth day of school?)  And some of those numbers...well, that is just crazy!  But we had a good time guessing and counting anyway.

Right after recess, Mrs. Murphy came and read a book to our class.  It was called Snowmen At Night.  It's all about what the author imagines snowmen do at night.  The kids loved it.  We played a couple of games too.  One where we had teams and they had to dress up one of their teammembers as Santa.  We gave them red tissue paper masking tape, black construction paper and some cotton balls.  It was so fun.  The kids really enjoyed it...and we ended up with some really fabulous Santas.

After that we played a game kind of like Hot Potato.  We had a present we passed around and everytime the music stopped the person holding it got to unwrap it.  I had wrapped it several times and it drove the kids crazy because there was always more wrapping paper underneath.  Finally someone unwrapped it the last time and there was a big box of Candy canes from me!  They had a lot of fun with that game.  We had all kinds of great snacks and Christmas cookies to share and best of all, we received some wonderful gifts for our classroom.  Puppets for a new puppet theater center, cars for our blocks center and a portable CD player for a listening center, just to name a few!  Thanks everyone!

Sammy is using sparkly pipe cleaners to create the letters in her name.  We also have candy cane pieces that we have been spelling words and making letters with this month.

One of our activities this month was creating paper chains in an AB pattern to count down the days until Christmas.

For our Thanksgiving celebration, we had a huge feast where our students had cheese, vegetables, popcorn, turkey and summer sausage, cornbread, nuts and apple juice.  Room 2 dressed as Indians and Room 1 dressed as pilgrims.  We also invited the HeadStart class and they came dressed as turkeys!  We had over 60 kids sitting at tables all in one room, while the parents served them.  We sang some Thanksgiving songs and even had an opportunity for our students to say what they were thankful for. 

Before the feast we did some thanksgiving centers.  We colored a turkey glyph, made Squanto's snack, made our placemats and wrote what we were thankful for in our journals.

Our classmates waiting in line at the "polls" 
We talked about how waiting in line can be a part of the voting experience too!

Dylan voting for president on our mock ballots.

Sam volunteered to work the polls.  She handed out ballots and helped our classmates place their ballots in the ballot box.

Destiny tallies the votes.

Today in Room 2 we had a Mock Election.  We talked about voting and the candidates.  We created a ballot box and we talked about the voting process.  After we voted we made our own "I voted!" stickers and then as a class we tallied the votes.  The results in room 2's election were:
Obama - 15
McCain - 7

Below you can see pictures of some of our proud voters!