October school

This month, I did not take nearly enough pictures of Valerie's school activities. October was very busy. Normally I think it is a long month, but it went so fast. We had a vacation to Minnesota for my cousins wedding reception. We also went to the Rainforest Cafe, Mall of America, Lego Land, American girl store, and Nickelodeon Universe. This trip gave us lots of fun stuff to journal about.

Valerie has really been working on her presentation skills at Classical Conversations. She is a little shy and worries that she will forget her words, but she is getting better and sometimes looks forward to this activity!  Below she did a picture of her favorite animal..the cat..and then she wrote facts about it.

 October also had lots of fun pumpkin activities. We counted seeds, we estimated candy corn, we painted pumpkins, we read fun poems. We went to a pumpkin patch. I love that learning is fun if we make it fun!

September

Valerie is loving kindergarten. She loves every activity that she gets to do! She often wants to do more than we have time for!

Not sure why this picture is side ways, but this was one of her presentations for Classical Conversations. She did it on cats. Valerie is still a little scared of presentations and she struggles with not wanting to mess up. We are working on building confidence right now!

We had friends over for a spider day. They made spider books and painted spider pictures! We also read books and did poetry on spiders! Super fun day!

 

We now have these hanging on the wall for the month of October!

 

We went to Wonders of Wildlife Learning Center at Bass Pro to learn about invertebrates. Here she is with Abi making a jelly fish.

Here is the Sebastian crab she made!

We joined a mops group and she made a face while learning about how she is special.

We did a small unit on leaves and did some leaf rubbings.

We also had a great first day of Fall by having friends over to make pumpkin spice playdough! Such a fun time! We love school and we love Fall!

Apple day

One of the very best parts of kindergarten is the thematic units. It is such a great aspect of learning that we decided to invite some friends over to share in the learning fun with us!

 We spent time reading about and learning about Johnny Appleseed! Then we colored and apple and labeled the parts!

 Next we had fun with poetry. The girls worked on memorizing this apple poem! So cute to hear them say, "Crunch, crunch, crunch!"

 Then we did some graphing. They each got to try a red apple, a yellow apple, and a green apple. Then they put their apple onto the graph.

 Yellow was the winner (my favorite)!

 Next the girls filled out their own graph with the data!

Learning is never complete without food! :) I used the book, Book Cooks by Chryl Apgar. It has steps to follow to make simple snacks. They followed the directions and made apple smiles out of apples, peanut butter, and marshmallows. 

 The final learning project was to learn about seasons by using an apple tree. We learned how the leaves fall off in the fall, then the tree is bare in the winter, it gets blooms in the spring, and finally apples in the late summer!