Fabulous Friday learning about money

During our math class this afternoon we began learning about the nickel. We had previously learned about the penny so we were building knowledge based off of 1 cent. The goal of the lesson was for students to build a deep understanding of the difference between the nickel and the penny and why we use the nickel and penny for different reasons. Other objectives for the lesson were to skip count by five as we counted each student's one nickel, make exchanges with pennies and nickels, explore the characteristics of the nickel, and learn about the value of the nickel.

After students were done exploring the nickel and we discussed the value of the nickel we decided to challenge ourselves with a game of penny and nickel exchanges. The game consists of two students and a bank with pennies and nickels. One at a time, students roll a die and take as many pennies that show up on the die. Each time students have five or more pennies they have to exchange out those pennies for nickels. First student to 5 nickels wins the game. I attached a couple videos of the students playing the game.  Next week it is my hope to give the students some authentic experiences buying things with money and having them use the exchange strategies we practiced today. Have a wonderful weekend.

Wonderful Wednesday!

Wanted to share with you some pictures of the students working on their fabric project. They were provided with a ton of fabric and their job was to cut it out and make clothes for the outline on their handout. They all seemed to really enjoy this project and we will finish it tomorrow.

Learning about short I

This week our entire class has been learning about what sound short i makes and what words it will be used in. We are working with word searches, word sorts, magnetic letters, read aloud books, as well as other activities. Today we split up into two different teams and played against each other to see which team could come up with the most amount of cvc (consonant-vowel-consonant) short i words. Teams would have to work on stretching out the word to make sure it was a real word and not a nonsense word. Everyone did an amazing job! We ended with a tie. Below are some of the pictures from our game.

Learning to measure

In math today we worked on learning how to measure ourselves. Students were allowed to pick any tool they thought would work well to see how tall they were. Students picked markers, crayons, blocks, cutouts of their foot, etc. They recorded their data and will share it with the class tomorrow. The point of the lesson(s) is for them to begin to develop an understanding of why we use a standard measure tool. Here are a few pics from our exploration...

Conference Sign-up

Hello Everyone,

In order to make signing up for spring conferences a little bit easier I have added the sign-up sheet to Google docs. All you need to do is click on this link and type in the name of your child in a time that would work best for you. Google docs will save everything automatically for you.  I have added everyone that had previously signed-up.

I will also be trying this out for snack sign-up if everyone thinks this will work. I can also send out hard copies if that is preferable.

Thanks,

Jared Ritz

Here are a couple pictures from our first day in the new classroom. Everyone had such a great time building new friendships.You can click on each picture to make them larger.

Glimpse into our new classroom

Here is a quick video of our new classroom. Can't wait to see how it looks once more of the students' 

 work is up by the end of the week.

Welcome to our new classroom!

Welcome to our new classroom!

Welcome to our new and exciting kindergarten classroom here at Van Allen! This will be our blog for the remainder of the year and I hope to update frequently. Thank you everyone for being so welcoming as we transition into this new class. I'm so excited to get started with your child on Tuesday. I have some fun team building activities planned along with a continuation of the curriculum that the other three classrooms will be working on.

This week it is our plan to work on on building short a consonant-vowel-consonant word. Students will also be working on changing the initial and final sounds to create new words. We will also be working on punctuation: periods, exclamation points, and use of the question mark. Our sight words for the week will be "do" and "by".

Our "I can" statements for this week:
1. I can change the sounds to make new words.
2. I can use correct capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.
3. I can talk about how two books on the same topic are alike and different.

I hope everyone has a great week and if you have any questions or concerns do not hesitate to contact me through phone or email.

-Mr. Ritz