Artist at Work

Several Dunham students dream of becoming an artist one day.

For them, I want to share this video my brother, Jim, made.

James, as he is known in the art world, is an artist. This video shows him working on a set of illustrations for Scientific American. I am sure you will enjoy it, and even if you're not interested in becoming an artist, if only to see what Mr. Gurney's brother looks like.

See it full screen.

Homework Over the Long Weekend

Ah, what a week! Valentine's Day, Mrs. Everson away for a couple of days, and here we are at the edge of a four day weekend for the students.

I've been so busy both at school and away from school that I haven't had enough time to sleep, let alone blog about kindergarten. Even now I really don't have the time, but I'm going to blog anyway.

We played a game called "Swiper" the other morning. It's part of the homework over the long weekend. Please play Swiper more than once using different objects.

We did a new activity today called "Word Hunt." The idea here is to look at some simple words and see which of them are real words. On the chart below there are 6 regular words and 11 that are not real words. But there are three words that are in between real and make believe words because the sound like real words, but are misspelled. Those in between words are giv, fol, nik.

Can your child read these seventeen real and make believe words? If not, please practice them at home. We'll be doing more like these in the coming weeks.

Valentine's Day will be here soon, Tuesday.

Tuesday coming up is Valentine's Day. On Tuesday we will have a Valentine's Day card exchange.

I invite your child to come to school on Tuesday a Valentine's Card for all the classmates. There are 28 pupils in kindergarten right now...

Please note:

To save countless headaches:

Please do not ask your child write their classmates' names on their cards.

Thank you.

Friday, February 10, 2012

I drove to school through a rain shower. I'm grateful for the rain we've gotten and I hope we receive a lot more rain in the coming weeks.

I smiled when I came through the breezeway and saw that I had forgotten to bring in the towels I had hung the day before to dry in Thursday's warm (70 F) breezes. Somehow, they didn't get dry!

I love the fact that our PE teacher Jane Campbell knows that kids are waterproof. Years ago the slightest bit of moisture on the ground would put everyone inside all day long. But Friday we went out for PE. Everyone survived.

We tried to catch up on our story reading... we heard Kayla K.'s story about a Princess Palooza. I was pleased this time that the boys did not express any displeasure (as they have in the past) at having me read a book intended for girls, even though they may have felt some disgruntlement. That's what good manners are all about.

Kayla and her book

Caleb conquered the Soundabet Queen Cards on Friday. Everyone in kindergarten was very happy about Caleb's success because I gave everyone a longer recess (indoors, rainy) as a reward. My hope is to give added incentive for others to follow Nathan's and Caleb's lead.

Caleb now has a Queen's Card up by his name.

Caleb achieved his milestone as the day began. I scheduled it first thing because I had disappointed Caleb the day before by not squeezing in his request to conquer the Queen Cards.
Caleb's dad, Joe, who brought him to school Friday, looked like he was about to leave. I asked him to stick around and witness Caleb's attempt to vanquish the Queen Cards. So Joe stood by the classroom door to see it all unfold, not that he needed to be asked.

Unbeknownst to me, Joe had an iPhone and took a movie of the event. Had I known he was filming, I would have asked him to come closer for a better view. What I like best about his movie is that I can hear the happy chuckling of a father videographer.

I asked Joe to post the video to Youtube, and he said he'd never done Youtube before. So I asked him to post his first Youtube video. (When he was five 30 years ago, Joe came to my kindergarten, and he's still willing to do little homework assignments from his old teacher.)

So here it is. Please enjoy.

Classroom News in Pictures

Very busy lately... little time for posting to the blog. 

Here is a look into some of what we've been up to the past few days in pictures:

Yesterday was MacKenzie's birthday.
She looked like it was her birthday.

We're making an interesting compound from
white glue and borax.

Kade brought the Bug Book.

MacKenzie brought this book for sharing.

This morning we did 116 laps around the track.
That's about 16 miles of walking.

We visited second grade to view dioramas...

and listen to reports about animals.

For Educators: Rethinking Education Paradigms

Here's an interesting talk by Sir Ken Robinson about rethinking what schooling does and how schooling is organized according to historical views. Times have changed, and schools must change with them to best meet the needs of its consumers: students.

Among the many points he makes is that designing schools around testing regimes is tragically misguided.  It is an error that the Chinese educational system has made, with the result that many Chinese students come to the US for post secondary educations. We would do well to strongly question and seriously rethink our infatuation with standardized tests.

We should rethink, too, our collective refusal to adequately fund schools.

It saw it a month or so and I keep thinking about it.

When you've got a bit more than 11 minutes to watch, come back here and see it.

Walk Along Glider

This looks pretty cool. It would be fun to make these.

How to Tie Shoes Correctly

I thought I knew how to tie shoes correctly until Mrs. Everson told me about this video about two months ago.

I'm an old dog, but willing to learn some new tricks. I tried the method she described and WHAT DO YOU KNOW? it did work better, much much better.

It's all about which way you wrap the laces when making the bow. I'd been doing it exactly as I had been taught: the wrong way. Once I switched, my laces stayed tied without any need for a "double knot" tying the lace loops again.

Watch this video to learn the secret if you don't already know.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Here's a picture taken early Friday after drawing dump trucks. We'll have another drawing lesson tomorrow between center sets. If you're a parent volunteer tomorrow, you can have the day off.

Vanessa brought in a very impressive collection for 100 day—a button collection sewn into a book. Here she is holding the book and showing its cover.

Inside it looks like this. There are 100 buttons there. We counted them.

Drew's chapter book captivated the kindergarten. We're going to read the second book in this Magic Tree House series beginning tomorrow.

Drew got the award for perseverance. He's tried to get the Soundabet several times, but has come up one or two cards short. He knows how to persevere: he won't give up, and before too long, I am sure he will succeed. Yeah Drew!

Day #100

Today, Thursday, February 2, 2012 was our hundredth day of kindergarten. We kept only the bare bones of our usual routines so we look at 100 in some different ways.

We began by looking at our collections of 100. There were so many! Not 100, but quite a few. Here—

To start, we gathered all the collections on the rug.

We put 10 black sqaures around the edge....

and put 10 collections on each sqare

There were 8 collections on the final square
and three squares empty.

We counted 68 collections all together.

We shared each other collections at the end.
Baseball cards are fun to look at.

Dylan was proud of his 100 Lego pieces.

Today we added one stick to the 99.....

and made our first SUPER bundle of 100.

 Microwave popcorn is the most familiar sort these days. But its fun to try popping corn in other ways, too. I never tried popping corn on a griddle before, but it works quite well for a kindergarten demonstration of popping corn.

Protect the floor and cover with clean paper

Crank her up to 350, pour on some oil....

and soon you will see some popping.

This activity delighted the class because so many had never seen corn pop out in the open like this.
(Note to teachers and parents who might try this. Be sure to caution your kids to stay well back from the griddle. It's hotter than it looks and would burn if touched. Also, as you can see from the oil dots on the blue paper, the oil spatters as the popcorn kernals fly off the griddle. The hot oil can cause a brief pinprick of burning ouch on bare skin.)

We juiced 100 baby carrots along with a half dozen apples and enjoyed the juice with our snack today.

We had fun most of the day. But when we were riding bikes trying to collectively ride 100 laps we had some girls hurting each others feelings with the tried and true, "I won't play with you" strategy. Oh, it can hurt.

So we finished the day with a little talk about how many warnings I'll give before issuing them a time out the next time that one comes out of their mouths.

Zero.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

We started off a new month today. In reviewing the calendar, we saw that there are lots of birthdays and some special events scheduled in February. The next one is tomorrow night, Math Night from 6 to 7 here at the school. The three rooms in the back wing will be open and available for you to take part in a night of activities related to math.

Today we began with mathy patterning activity on the green mat. We saw many interesting patterns including the ones pictured here:

I'm loving the math center on weighing things using a balance scale.

Stasia was proud of her work.

After we finished the formal lesson, Jake stayed on to see what might weigh more than a block and a car. It took quite a collection of items to outweigh those two.

Found a moment to read Emily's book that she brought to school yesterday on her day to share. The class noticed that the text rhymed.

Bianca keeps me organized. Here I've snapped a photo of her going through the book boxes. Bella's noticing that the Go, Dog, Go! book is slightly larger than the others, but from the same series and publisher. It's an interesting sorting problem. Does it belong because it's from the same company or should it be removed because it is a different size from all the rest?

 Ian brought his book about Lego pirate, Captain Brickbeard. This is his favorite page.

In TRIBES Mrs. Everson and my tribe joined up for a game of "Heads Up, Seven Up." It was a fun game. Drew was the only player to never be guessed. I guess he has an unusually innocent face.

Be well.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Please make it to the end for a couple of announcements.

It's already the last day of January. We're almost to Day #100 (Thursday) when the homework of collecting 100 objects is due. I hope that most kinders can bring in 4 sets of 100 objects in ziploc baggies so we can see 100 100's. That's ten thousand things in all the collections.

Many enjoyable moments today. For one thing, it was Kayla K.'s sixth birthday today. She brought cupcakes which arrived late in the morning, so we enjoyed them (or saved them) as the day came to and end.

Happy birthday, Kayla!

It being the final day of the month we took one last look at our monthly weather record. In January we had more days that were cold than any other. Sunny days came in second with cloudy days not far behind. There was only one rainy day this month. It's, of course, not normal for January in Northern California to be so dry, but the kinders wouldn't have much reason to know that. Worries me, though.

Today was Emily's day to chart the weather.

We welcomed Tanner back from his sledding trip.

Rocco's dad, Andy Poncia showed up with one of his trucks for us to see.

He answered all the questions we could think of. They get about 6 miles to the gallon. Have about 400 horsepower. Ride on 10 $300 tires that last about 100K miles.

We measured one of the 100 gallon fuel tanks. It was 7 kidfeet long.

Andy showed us how it tips up to dump a load of fertilizer.

We all got to climb into the drivers seat and crawl through the cab to get to the other side. Here's Rocco who's been up in the cab plenty of times before with his dad.

We used our kidfeet to measure other things like my six foot long guitar.

The green mat is 14 kidfeet from front to back.

After cleaning up from snack, Bianca made her way down to the green mat and waited their quietly. Thank you, Bianca!

Here we clean up after ourselves. I can remember in August how difficult it was to learn how to do these tasks smoothly. Now it is almost second nature.

After PE we went to the library to listen to a story read by Mrs. Burger and to refresh our collection of books on loan from the library.

I try to get plenty of nonfiction titles.

As a boy, I loved nonfiction. Still do.

Jessica and Vanessa showed up in these outer garments this morning.

And now, for the announcements:

1. Tomorrow, Wednesday is Tribes. Dismissal is at 1:30.

2. There is "Family Math Night" scheduled for February 2, Thursday evening from 6 to 7 PM. This is a great opportunity to visit the other classrooms and see some of the ways numbers and math concepts can be used for pleasure and enjoyment. Here in kindergarten we'll have the familiar Cusinere Rods and perhaps a few other mathy items available for students to use.


Be well.