Mrs. Garrabrant's Classroom: Groundhog Day, Ocean, Love & More!

We had another fun filled week here in Kindergarten! We learned about Groundhog Day, continued to research about the ocean, watched ocean web cams, wrote about ocean animals and worked on reading books in literacy lab to share with our preschool reading buddies, discussed what we thought love was, and more! Check out more details below.

We discussed what Groundhog Day was and what it meant if the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow or not. The students voted on whether they thought he would see it or not.

More students wanted him to not see his shadow so spring would come sooner and they were right! We talked about how some people believe that the groundhog's prediction is correct and some people do not.

The students were excited to watch the announcement video to find out that the Groundhog did not see his shadow.

We have continued to read many books about the ocean in order to learn as many facts as we can. Below you can see Miss Dupont reading a story with the class as well.

I am no artist but I wanted to share one of the pieces of writing I modeled for the class so you can see what we have been discussing during writing time. We have discussed adding labels to our pictures by writing the sounds. We work as a class to sound out the word as I write the sounds that we hear. For example to label corral we wrote crl and to label shark we wrote shrk. We have also been working on writing a short sentence at the bottom of our picture to tell our reader what it is about. We learned the word 'this' so we have been working on writing the sentence 'This is a ____." These are both strategies that you can use at home when you are working with your child as well. We have also discussed adding a black line to our pictures in order to make them stand out around the water. Lastly, we have been working on drawing our pictures first with pencil and then coloring last especially the water that way it makes the pictures easier to see.

We have been looking at many live ocean web cams on youtube as well. They have helped us learn more about ocean animals even thought the web cams aren't actually in the ocean but are instead in aquariums.

They enjoyed observing this shark web cam and in the picture on the right, there was a person in a scuba suit cleaning the tank out, which they thought was very cool!

This aquarium web cam was of leafy sea dragons which look like silly seahorses!

This web cam was from the Aquarium of the Pacific. One afternoon we saw people in the tank and heard them giving a tour to customers and the students were in awe!

In order to wrap up our ocean study and begin working on our presentations and projects, we discussed all of the ocean animals that we have learned about. Next week the students will vote for which animals they would like to become experts on and create projects/presentations to share with other classes.

In literacy lab we learned about what the letters -ng say and read a book about different things that have that sound in them.

We have also been working on reading comprehension. After reading a story we discuss whether we like the story or not and why. We also retell the events of the story in order as a group and discuss our favorite part. These are all things that you could begin discussing with your child as you read stories with them at home as well!

We also read a book called, "People Who Help". We shared these books, our -ng books and our ocean animal writing pieces with our preschool reading buddies this week. We practiced reading these stories with our peers in order to increase fluency.

We shared these books, our -ng books and our ocean animal writing pieces with our preschool reading buddies this week. Since we have been working with the same preschool reading buddies all year, the students asked if they could change in order to meet and work with new friends. They really enjoyed sharing their work with their new friends.

Other exciting things happening this week:

The students enjoyed playing outside a few days this week since it was nice enough. Raegan and Emma used the logs on the playground to make a fire and shortly after this picture was taken, they had many friends gathered around pretending to roast marshmallows with sticks.

Miss Dupont worked with the students to practice their sight words.

We read a few more Stuart Little books that I found at the library. The one on the left had pictures from the movie and the one on the right was all new!

My mom read these books to me when I was a child and I started reading a few of them to the students as I have noticed a need in the classroom for the social skills.

Since Valentine's Day is next Friday, we began discussing what we thought love was to us. We talked about it as a class and then the students drew their version as well. Many students associate love with their families and said love is "when their heart is full".

We will continue to explore this in more depth next week!