Zoo

Wednesday of last week we finally let our butterflies go...the kiddos were so excited to see them fly off into sky. I think this is the first year that I didn't have any tears as we let them go! 

On Thursday, we went our local zoo. It is a perfect size zoo for our kinders. Not too big and not too small. I say local, but it is still about an hour and 10 minutes away from our school, which makes for a LONG bus ride for the kiddos and for teachers!!! Loud, silly kids = teacher's needing ibuprofen! haha! 

The weather was a little chilly...not very seasonal weather for the end of May. We all had to wear jackets to stay warm! But thank goodness the rain held off! 

Once we got the the zoo, the kiddos were sent off with their chaperone to visit all the animals and take a train ride through the zoo. Some students were even able to feed the giraffes! How fun! 

 

 
There is also a small petting zoo where students can feed some farm animals and pet them. Which the kiddo's enjoy as well. 

One of the neatest parts of the whole day, was getting to hear the lions making their loud grunting noises. You could hear them all the way across the zoo! We think that the female and the male were fighting over who was in charge in their cage!! 

And then the female went to sleep...maybe to ignore the male (haha) or just out of frustration or exhaustion. 

The lions weren't the only ones who liked the attention from all their noise...I think the monkeys were showing off too! They were screeching so loudly to get everyone's attention. At first the kiddos thought it was birds...but as they soon learned, it was the wild and silly monkeys swinging around on the ropes. 

We also saw a jaguar...well two of them actually. One was just sitting there staring at all of the people and the other one kept creeping in and out of their building every time someone tried to snap a picture. Well....later, we found out why...he was trying to go to the bathroom (which he ended up doing right in front of us...but I guess when ya gotta go, ya gotta go). 

This is the one who let it all out in front of us!

Later, when we went to see the elephants, someone behind us had peanuts and were throwing them to the elephants. It is REALLY AMAZING to watch an elephant pick up a teeny tiny peanut with that big ol' trunk! Just amazing! 

Here are some of the other beautiful animals we saw at the zoo that day.

Zebras

 

Bald Eagle 

 

Bobcats

 

Panther 

And then, just to show how exhausted the kiddo's were...here is a picture of one of my cherubs who fell asleep on my lap...I could have joined her, had I not had 50 other kinders on the bus :) 

So all in all, it was a great day!! How can you not have fun at the zoo!?!?!?!

9 more days for us...and then...SUMMER BREAK!!

Caterpillars and Butterflies in the Garden!

Last month I taught my students about "line" in Art when we were making a quilt with stripes. (To see that lesson click here.) At that point in time, I only taught them about straight lines. But, as I was looking through some different sources to help better teach my students about line, since we no longer have an Art teacher at our K-1 building. In my search, I came across two very good ones. The first one is Deep Space Sparkle. Deep Space Sparkle is a website that has Art Lesson's for kids. They have Art lessons for grades K-6. The other source I came across was Art's Attack. Art's Attack is a collection of DVD's that teach different Art lessons. If you go to their website, they have a free trial offer. Our school just purchased these DVD's with a grant that we received. 

I took both of these sources and combined them to make a Butterfly Garden in the hallway above my students lockers. I chose to do this because we had just finished up our unit on plants, and we had drawn flowers to hang in the hallway and our next unit was Butterflies! 

I started by reading the lessons on Deep Space Sparkle and watching the lesson on Line from Arts Attack so that I was prepared and knew where to start.  Caterpillars were first because caterpillars come before the Butterfly. 

Each student got a 8.5 X 11 piece of any color paper to practice on. Students come to the carpet with their clipboard and a black felt tip marker. On the smartboard, I brought up the painting "Woman in a Purple Coat" by Henri Matisse. In this painting there are several different types of line to show the students (thick, think, straight, curvy, contour, parallel...). As we discussed each of these lines, I modeled how to make that kind of line and then had the students do the same. 

Once students were done practicing, I showed them how to make a caterpillar using a large circle at first and then using backward C's (curved lines) to make the rest of the caterpillar's body. Then in each circle, I showed them some of the lines I could make. I then sent them off to their seats with a 9 X 12 paper and told them to make their caterpillar with large circles that went the length of the page. 

If you notice, the practice sheet is the purple sheet next to her work.

 
 I turned them loose and let them design their caterpillar making sure that each circle was different. 

 Since the caterpillars looks so incredibly awesome in black and white, I decided not to have them color them. We just cut them out and hung them in the hallway with our flowers, since caterpillars like to munch on leaves!

 Then since our caterpillars turned out so incredibly "cool", I decided to have students do the same with our butterflies. When I teach about drawing, designing and coloring butterflies, I also teach about symmetry. Thus, when the students drew a line on one side of the butterfly, they had to go to the other side of the butterfly and do the same. Again, I did some example lines and then sent them to their seats to get started. This time instead of leaving our butterflies black and white like we did the caterpillars, We colored our butterflies in with crayon.

When the butterflies were finished...they were hung in the butterfly garden above the flowers and caterpillars!

    

We finished up just in time for our real live butterflies to come out of their chrysalis's. We came to school today to discover that FIVE of our six butterflies popped out to join us!!! How exciting for a MONDAY!!!! 

 I hope you all have a fabulous week! 

We are off to the zoo on Thursday! My FAVORITE place for a field trip! 

Polk-a-dots and Stripe Galore!

On April 24th, Debbie Clement visited our school and my kinder kiddos welcomed her with three of her most favorite things! 

POLK-A-DOTS and STRIPES 

AND...

A quilt!!!

I promised to share how we designed the quilt and I am going to make good on that promise right now! 

First off, I have known Debbie for awhile now and really, anyone that knows her, knows that she loves polk-a-dots, stripes and she is a MAJOR quilter! Check out her books and you will see! 

So, knowing all of that, I hatched a plan...to welcome her to Washington Elementary with just those things! 

I was teaching my children about line...particularly straight lines, at the time and so I had them paint white stripes on black construction paper and orange stripes on white construction paper. 

The following day, we talked about polk-a-dots and where we might see them. Then I gave each student a large pon-pom. Gripping the pon-pom with their finger tips (great fine motor activity),  the students dipped it in the white paint and then smooshed it down on their black paper to make their polk-a-dots all over the page. 

Then the tough part...I re-taught students how to cut circles out of paper by turning their paper as they cut. They had to cut out white circles to glue on orange paper. Thus, continuing the patter or orange/white and black/white.

After all the glue and painted pieces were dry, I took the 9 X 12 construction paper pieces and cut them in half making them 6 X 9. Then, I went and got a long strip of orange butcher paper and we started to tape our pieces in a pattern across the width of the butcher paper and continuing down until the whole strip was filled. By the end, we had a quilt that was from ceiling to floor! I hung it in the hallway so that each time the students would see their hard work daily...and to also let Debbie see it on her way down to see us!! 

Here is the finished product! 

 My kinder kiddos did an amazing job and they were so proud of their quilt! 

Carie Ramirez

Debbie Clement Came to Visit!

Soooo, I was SOOOO excited to have Debbie Clement visit our school and I have not been able to blog about it! My internet has been going in and out for over a week now!!! I think we are finally up and running THANK GOODNESS!

Debbie and I had been planning for over 2 years to get together and this year, it FINALLY happened! She came and hung out at our K-1 school for the whole day. She did four 50minute sessions with pre-k, kinder and 1st grade kiddos and then did a teacher session where teachers could ask questions and learn more about the guest of honor.  Not only did the students LOVE her...so did the adults! I must say, so many of them needed Debbie this time of the year. Several of them said they had been in a slump and that Debbie's pulled them right out of that slump!  If you haven't had the music lady with stripes and polk-a-dots...AKA Debbie Clement come to your school yet...you need to work on that. You will not be disappointed...but you will be left wanting more!

Here are some photos from that day!

After Debbie's LONG day at Washington school, she then did a show for the whole community at our local community college. Lot's of fun, lot's of laughs and lots of dancing! The students who saw Debbie at school, were so excited to see her again at night AND to get the chance to buy a personally signed copy of  the book "Red, White and Blue" which our school had deemed "THE BEST SONG EVER". I might have just had a LITTLE to do with that because I introduced them to it and introduced SEVERAL others actually! Why? Because it tugged at my heart strings the first time I heard it and it is the book/song that brought Debbie and I together as friends! And the rest is history! To read some of the projects I have done and my colleagues have done in response to Debbie's picture books click on the name of the book below.

Red White and Blue 

You're Wonderful

The last creation my kinders made was this welcome quilt for Debbie! I will share how we went about making this in my next blog!

SOOOOO, if you haven't booked Debbie Clement....WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!?!?! Oh, and if you want a little dose of her before she comes to your school...she is the Keynote presenter at the National Kindergarten Conference in LasVegas this summer! 

Awaiting the Arrival of a Very Special Guest!!!

This week we have a VERY SPECIAL GUEST coming to our school! 

Debbie is not only a guest, but a dear friend of mine who I have been awaiting the opportunity to have at my school for quite some time! 3 years to be exact! I met Debbie three years ago at he Illinois Reading Conference. I was walking around the conference with a terrible migraine, when some lady in a crazy fun outfit (that I LOVED and WANTED) walked up to me and said, "Hey, I love your purse! As a matter of fact I love giraffes...I even wrote a book about a giraffe". And then, she was off on her merry way! I looked at my watch and realized I had better be on my way too! So I headed down the stairs to the next session on my list and what do ya know....There she was! I was going to this lady's session! This is where I officially met Debbie Clement! She really caught my attention with her book/song Red White and Blue! And that is where our friendship began! She is one amazing person...inspirational, talented, awesome, loving, caring, crazy, fun, and a lot more technologically saavy than she gives herself credit for! 

I can't wait to see her again on Wednesday! And I can't wait for my colleagues and students to be able to enjoy her talents! 

 

 

Little Poets Get Published

April: Poetry Month!! 

This blog post is a continuation of my Making Little Poets blog that I posted at Pre-K and K Sharing last week. 

 

In that blog we were in the process of working together, as a class, to write our very own poem. I wanted my students to understand that it takes a lot of hard work, editing and re-writing to get  a book or poem published. So we talk about the steps that they take to do this.

 

Here are the steps we took in writing a class poem (for more detail, please read my blog Making Little Poets)

Day 1: Brainstorming

Students brainstorm topics that they wanted our class poem to be about.

 

Day 2: Getting Started 

Start writing the poem...come up with the first sentence and edit along the way if need be.

 

                               

  Day 3: Continue/finish writing rough draft and begin editing 

 Read over what has already been written and continue to write the poem until it is finished.  As a rule of thumb, I like to keep the poems to 10 lines or less (mainly because I want it to fit in a pocket chart once it is written out on sentence strips but also because I want to wrap it up in 5 days otherwise the kiddos start to lose interest).

Day 4: Edit and re-write

Read the poem and decide what changes need to be made. Then re-write the poem and re-read it again to make sure it is just how we want it :) Thursday, we read through our poem to see if the students liked the way it sounded. As we read it, we talked about the beat or the rhythm that  poems can have. This made the students look at the poem in a whole new light and also made them want to change a couple things and make the poem a little longer. 

At the beginning of Thursday's lesson, this is what our Poem looked like:

Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
My friends are really cool!  

By the end of the the lesson our poem became a little longer and read like this:

Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
We sit together and read.
Walking straight down the hallway,
We like to be in the lead.   

 Day 5: Final Copy

Thursday night, I typed up the final copy to share with the students on the Smart Board. On Friday, I pulled up the poem on the Smart Board and we read it together. After we read it, one of my students brought up the fact that they didn't like the sentence "walking straight down the hallway" because it sounded funny. I agreed, so we tried to figure out how to change it so that the rythm of the poem made a little more sense. By changing one word, the poem sounded better. We made the change, wrote the poem out on sentence strips and put it in the pocket chart to work on next week before my students perform it! We didn't put the poem in our PIG folders yet, because I wanted my students to know the poem better before putting it in their PIG folders to take home and read to their families. 

So here is our final copy that is officially "published" in our classroom collection of poems! 

Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
We sit together and read.
Walking straight down the hall,
We like to be in the lead.  

~Mrs. Ramirez's Kindergarten Class 

 

Presentation Day:

This week, on Friday, we have our Poetry Celebration Assembly and my students will be able to recite the poem, written by them, in front of their peers! 

This weeks poetry agenda includes List Poems! By the end of the week, my students will be writing their own list poems and having them published in our very own Poetry Anthology Book! Although this year I am doing it a little different, to see how I teach List Poems check out my We Love Poetry! Or to see how I do poetry throughout the school year, click here! 

If you have any questions about how I did this or how I teach poetry in my classroom, please feel free to ask! 

Missing in Action

Hi friends! Oh how I have missed sharing with you!! 

 I know it has been a really long time since I have shared with you and I am sorry for that! We went through a pretty crazy time these past few months. Back in February, we were working really hard on negotiating a contract (as we had been working without one since the beginning of the school year). Then by the end of February we were pretty sure that it was inevitable that we would be on strike. This was very unfortunate but we were standing up for what our students need and what they deserve.
Then, in March, we DID go on strike for 9 whole days. It was nine days of camaraderie, nine days or h-e-double hockey sticks and 9 days or reflection.  Then, finally, at 2am on day 10, I got a phone call that said the strike had ended and we would be back in the classroom that morning at 7a! I have never been so happy to receive a phone call so early in the morning! I couldn't wait to get back into the classroom with my students! I had missed them sooooo much!

I will say that the strike of 2013 (as we call it) has brought each and every teacher in our district closer together and made us a stronger union. We formed a bond that no one can break and became a family of teachers. It used to be "Oh, so and so teaches at this school and so and so teaches at that school" and now we say "yes, we work together".

It really makes me kind of sad that it took a strike to make us closer but I will say that I am glad that it happened. We needed something to help us build that bond and it also helped realize that our community supports us more than we ever knew was possible. They were wonderful throughout the whole ordeal with their generous gifts of support, prayer, notes, food, and their homes. I cannot thank them enough!

Now that I am finally back in the swing of things, I hope to keep you updated with new ideas and happenings in my classroom!