We Love Pete the Cat

We love Pete the Cat in kindergarten! We read all of his books and then I introduce our Pete puppet by having him delivered in a package.  He brings us our first class book and some buttons.

After recess, Pete goes missing and leaves us this note:

He leaves us buttons around the school and we need to go find him! This gives us a chance to explore the new building and meet some teachers.  After his long journey, Pete needed a bath ;)

Then we can come back to the classroom and learn all about sorting using the buttons that Pete brought us.  We sorted by color, shape, size and type. 

First Week Activities

Here are some of our first center activities that we started today, the kids did a great job! They even organized and packed up their own folders today AND we managed to get out on time.  I am so proud of them!

Listening Center

Magnet Center 

Roll and Write Center

Writing Center 

First Days!

We have slow start in kindergarten, so half the students came yesterday and half came today! It's a great way to help the class get comfortable with their new classroom and their new school! We did lots of Pete the Cat themed activities including reading, singing and making a Pete the Cat craft.  We also got to know each other and explored our new classroom! 

 

Curriculum Night

In case you weren't able to make it, here is the presentation that we give during curriculum night! 

You can watch it all here:

Dot Day

Yesterday was International Dot Day based on the book The Dot by Peter Reynolds.  

We celebrated by making our own dot day hats using dot markers and we got to meet our second grade buddies! We decorated our own dots with our buddies and then used an awesome app called colAR to turn our dots into 3D pictures.  

Pete the Cat Sorting

Since we've been reading lots of Pete the Cat books, I thought it would be fun to sort our shoes in math after reading I Love My White Shoes.  We took all of our shoes off and put them in the middle of the carpet.  Then we took turns picking two shoes and giving a reason why they were the same.  We did the same thing with how two shoes were different.  After that we did some rounds of making piles of shoes around the room of shoes with velcro vs. laces, blue shoes vs. other colors, sandals vs. tennis shoes and more.  It was a fun way to do some interactive sorting in math! 

Then we sorted a bunch of buttons! Also Pete related from My Four Groovy Buttons!

Pillowcases

During our open house, we send the students home with a special pillowcase with all of the first words we will learn on them.  We do the heart word sets from Nellie Edge, so the pink and purple sets are printed on the pillowcases.  This year we decided to print onto iron on transfer paper and iron the words on.  We also send the kids home with a special poem to read the night before school starts!

Daily Schedule Plans

I love having a daily schedule to follow. This is a general framework, of course there are lots of times that we might let one activity go long if we're having fun or I want to add in more or less of a subject for special projects.