Exciting Week Ahead

We have another exciting week ahead of us. The children have made predictions about the Groundhog seeing his shadow. Eleven students said no, he would not see his shadow and Spring would soon be here! Eight students said yes, he would see his shadow, go back into his burrow and we will have six more weeks of Winter weather. Now we all know that this is about as reliable as the weather forecast on the news, but it is fun to predict. Their predictions are displayed in the hallway and we will see which predictions are correct on Thursday! Not only will Thursday be an exciting day because of Groundhog Day, but we are also excited about an author visiting our school! Eddie Bowman, aka, Chester Drawers will entertain us on Thursday. He has written several funny books and has songs to go along with the books. He will sing some of the songs for us all dressed up in his silly overalls and hat! He visited WGS a few years ago and the children just loved hearing his stories and singing along with Chester Drawers. We all look forward to Thursday!

100 Days of School

We have had an exciting week in kindergarten! Not only did we do well on all of those assessments I talked about earlier, we celebrated 100 days of school! Today was the 100th day of school. Only 80 more days until the kiddos are "official first graders" and moving on up! To celebrate, we colored 100 squares, wore 100 Day hats, listened to stories about 100 Day, made the number 100 with pattern blocks, put together 100 attrilinks, and of course did all of the calendar activites that go along with 100 Day!

Writing Display

I wanted to share with you our writing that is displayed in the front lobby of the school. Our display was titled Can You See Me Now? and it was about adjectives. The children had to copy a simple sentence and add one or two adjectives to help us visualize (see) a picture in our mind of what we were reading about. They did a great job and I was very proud to display it for everyone to see! By the way, parents and grandparents - how old were you when you first learned about adjectives, nouns, and verbs?!?! I'll bet you were older than 5 or 6! We are smart kindergarten kiddos!

The Week Ahead

This will be a very busy week in our classroom. Along with all of our routine learning activities, we will have a unit test in Reading and a benchmark test in Math. We had our DIBELS test last week (look for more info about that in a later post) so assessments have been and will continue to be abundant in our classroom. I'm not a big fan of so many assessments, but they are required. One of my favorite analogies is Testing Students/Weighing Pigs. It goes like this: A farmer is raising a pig to take to the market. He weighs the pig quite often, but forgets to feed the pig daily. Should any of us be surprised that the pig gained very little weight and the market value wasn't much? I very often feel that too much emphasis and time is put on weighing our students rather than feeding them. Well, enough said about that, I will get off of my soap box now and get ready for a week with my kiddos. I know they have eaten up most of the "feed" I've dished out and their "weight" will be just fine!

Birthdays

Birthdays are really important to kindergarten kids. Last Friday morning, one of my students greeted me with, "Guess who is having a birthday today?" When I replied, "Santa Claus," he laughed and said that it was his mother's birthday. Now just like Art Linkletter used to do on his show, Kids Say the Darndest Things, I like to probe my students to just see what is going on in their heads. I asked him how old she was and he excitedly told me "Seventy-eight!" I got a good laugh out of this, visualizing his mom as a seventy-eight year old pregnant lady. Hope she doesn't read this and it cause her to go into early labor!

My First Blog

My name is Susan Kilpatrick. I am a kindergarten teacher at a small school named Walnut Grove. No, it is not Little House on the Praire, but Madison County, Alabama. I am in my 35th year of teaching so I have seen lots of changes during my career. One thing does not change though, kindergarten kids say and do the cutest things. That is the reason for the name of my very first blog. I've heard and seen a lot during my years of teaching. I wish I had written them all down, but I didn't take the time to do so. Some still come back to me so I will share those in later posts. As funny and cute things happen in my classroom now, I will share them with you here. This is also a good place for the parent's of my students to see what is going on in our classroom. Let the blogging begin!!!