Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Look Who's In Mrs Miller's Room! If you check the hall outside our door, you will see the children's coconut trees complete with their names spelled out in foam letters. They made these with Mrs. B during workstation/center time. I spent workstation time doing beginning assessments to learn who needs to be working on what when I begin small group instruction.

We started writer's workshop, but have not done any actual writing yet. We learned there are four things we can do during writer's workshop: think, draw, write, read. We spent writing time sharing things about ourselves like our favorite foods and what we like to do after school. This helps us get to know one another and will help us later when we have to think of things to write about.

During reading we listened to lots of ABC books including a riddle book that everyone enjoyed called It Begins With A. We added the emergent reader School to our book boxes and built up to four minutes of read to self time. We also took several sentences, read them together, cut the words apart, and reassembled the words.

In math, we worked on sorting objects by size, shape, and color.

Next week's theme is colors.

Beginning of a "Toadily" Awesome Year

We made it through the first three days. We spent lots of time learning procedures and routines.
We are learning all the PBIS procedures that everyone in the school will follow and our classroom procedures, too. Hallways, group bathrooms, and the first ten minutes of lunch are Zone 0. Zone 0 means no talking. That no talking thing is really tough on kinders, but they did an amazing job. Especially at lunch. We encourage them to eat first and then have quiet conversation. We are trying to use the group bathrooms several times a day. With 27 students, just getting a drink from the water fountain seems to take forever and bathroom breaks take even longer, but both are necessary!

This class seems to really like music and movement activities. "The Cowboy Song" and "Party in the Jungle" are already two favorites. We read lots of stories about Chester the raccoon. We learned that our schema is our background knowledge, everything that is in our brains. Our schema helps us understand what we read. We shared our schema for raccoons. We also learned our first reading strategy - Eagle Eye. We know to look at the pictures to help us figure out the words. We used this strategy during Read to Self time. During Read to Self time, each student reads by himself from his book box. Right now we are reading for three minutes, but we will be able to read longer as we build our stamina.

The children enjoyed calendar and games on the Smartboard. The Smartboard is a new thing for me, so we are learning about it together. The children also really liked center or workstation time. Housekeeping, moon sand, computers and drawing were favorite workstations.

I am looking forward to reading alphabet books next week. Hope everyone gets a good night's sleep and is ready for a full week! Smiles!

Work in Progress

I thought I would post some photos of our classroom. It is a "work in progress" right now. The above photo shows the home work station. That is one of several work stations where the children will work/play every day. We will have 6 tables or Learning Clubs for students. I didn't have enough plants for my tables, so I need to do some shopping. The turtle and the fish have not arrived at school yet. The trash cans are full from unpacking and I need to do some tidying, too.

You can see the big book work station in this photo and some of the tables (more trash, too!). The blue top boxes under the Smartboard are the children's individual book boxes that they will read from everyday during Read to Self or Read to Someone time.


This shows our reading work station, the pocket chart work station, part of our whole group meeting area, and the bulletin board that highlights the theme we are working on. The board is not finished yet. We will be learning about friendship at the beginning of the year.

That is all for now. Can't wait for school to start!
Smiles.....................Mrs. Miller

Mrs. Bumgarner and I want to welcome all of our new students and their parents to our classroom. We are very excited to be joining the LMES family and are looking forward to getting to know our students and their families. We will be posting news from our classroom on this blog.

Right now I would like to introduce myself. My name is Terri Miller and I have been teaching kindergarten for 35 wonderful years. It never gets old because every year I have new students and new challenges. Kindergarten is absolutely the best place to be. I am married and my husband, Phil, works for Goody2Shoes. We live in Columbia with our dog, Eddie, and three cats. Our children are grown. Our son, Matt, and his wife, Katherine, live in Atlanta and our daughter, Caitlin, lives in Mt. Pleasant.

I have never tried blogging before so this will be a learning experience for me. I have also written a grant at donorschoose.org. You can find a link for this on the top right side of this page. Maybe you know someone who would like to fund all or part of this grant. Spread the word.

Until next time.........smiles,
Mrs. Miller :-)