Applesauce

Thank you to everyone who sent an apple to school today. We sliced them, added some sugar and cinnamon and cooked them in a crock pot all day. Our room smelled delicious and we had many hungry staff members stopping by asking if they could have some.

Okay. So the photo doesn't do it justice. It may not look too appetizing from this direction, but truly, it was yummy!
 Here is our applesauce as its cooking. The recipe we used is below:
30 apples, skinned and diced thin
1/3 cup apple juice
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup brown sugar
Put all ingredients in crock pot on high. Once apples get tender, start mushing. Continue to cook and mush. Cook until soft and all mushed up! Yummy!

 Trying the applesauce!

Johnny Appleseed

While we are finishing up on our little learning unit on the Gingerbread man, we have started to move on to apples since today is Johnny Appleseed's birthday! We learned that Johnny loved apples so much that he traveled around the country giving away apple seed and apple trees. He walked without any shoes and had a pot on his head. He used the pot to cook with and to protect his head. We made our own pots for our heads in honor of his birthday.

 Johnny Appleseed wrote us a letter telling us that he would be coming through Winsted on his birthday! We met him outside when we were playing at recess.

Here is Johnny with the kindergarten students. 

Johnny talked about walking through town, what he does with apples and apple seeds and also gave us some apples to add to our applesauce we were making in the classroom. It was fun to see him!

Gingerbread Man

This has been a busy week in kindergarten! We have been reading different versions of the Gingerbread Man and comparing and contrasting the stories. In most stories, the Gingerbread cookie gets eaten at the end - though not all of the time! On Wednesday, we decided to make our own gingerbread cookie.

Here is Anthony mixing the dough.

After mixing the dough, Mrs. Heuer shaped it into a Gingerbread Man (with many suggestions from the students on how to do this:)

The students then got a chance to add decorations to our cookie.

Here is Emily, Lincoln and Josie adding more goodies to our cookie!

 Here is he is...ready to go in the oven!

After finding out that our cookie escaped from the school ovens, we chased him to the library, to the gym, to the office, to 1st grade, to 4th grade and finally found him back in our classroom! We watched him closely the rest of the day so that he would not escape and then ate him for snack. He was mighty delicious!

Glitter and Glue and Finger Painting, Oh MY!

Ari and Lincoln were curious to see what I was making...thus they got to stir!

It was a week full of glue (practicing how to use glue bottles), Glitter (to add some sparkle to our glue projects) and Finger Painting! We got to use chocolate pudding to pudding paint brown bears for Brown Day! You have just got to love kindergarten:)

On Wednesday, your child should have brought home a new pet - a Word Bird! I promise it is very easy to take care of. Every Monday, your child will be bringing home a small envelope with Word Bird Words in it. Take out the words, place them in the pocket of the Word Bird and practice them as time allows. The faster your child is at reading them, the easier it will be when we work on reading. If your child struggles, don't push it - just work on them as time and patience allows. Please make sure to return the empty envelope to school the following day. Your help at home is appreciated!!!

Glitter and Glue

So, I guess I need to apologize...glitter has started to happen in kindergarten. We have been practicing how to use glue bottles with control by putting little dots of glue onto black dots on paper. It isn't very much fun to see glue dry on paper so we add GLITTER! I apologize in advance for any glitter that gets in your home but we sure had fun with it!

Red Day!

2nd day of school!

We have started to make some great progress in learning our classroom and school rules and then today hit...the electricity went off just as we were finishing indoor recess - due to the rain. We ended up having Mrs. OL's class join us in our classroom for lunch since it had the most natural light. We had 38 kindergarten students eating on disposable trays. This was not in our lesson plans for the day but the students handled the endless changes amazingly! Our class is starting to really gel and we keep getting compliments from other staff members about how well they are following the rules. Wonderful! Hopefully we will be back on track for day three on Thursday!