The Connett Connection

We have been working through an apple theme since we started school in mid August.  We've done all sorts of apple activities.  Today, we did our first science experiment, do apples float or sink? Above are the sheets we used for this experiment.  The first one has detailed instructions on what to do as well as a material list.  The second page is the recording sheet where you can make your predictions and record your results.  The final page is a journal page for reflecting on what was observed! Here is our first test, the whole apple. Next we did half an apple. This picture shows all the parts of the apple in the bucket. Here is the recording sheet my daughter filled out.  She got half of her predictions right! Here is her journal page.  I wrote as she dictated to me.  She is not writing on her own yet, but I feel it is important to model the writing for her. She had a lot of fun with this experiment.  It was easy for her to do all of the instruc

I just remembered I had a whole bucket of word cards and clothes pins that I used to use with my Pre-K class when I taught that I could pull out and use with my daughter!  I used to place them in my writing center and change them out with the different themes and holidays we covered throughout the year. I would begin the year with my shapes, numbers and color cards in the center, as seen here and from there move on to the other themes.  I will show examples from my different themes at the end of this post.  For now, I will show you different ways to use these in a writing or literature center. The most common way I would use the cards was to have the students use clothes pins and spell the word using the pins. Another way was to spell the word using letter tiles or magnet letters. Another way was to have the students write the word on a sheet of paper. I made a ton of these when I was in the Pre-K classroom.  All I did was take sentence strips and cut them all t

Ever have a day, or week that did not go as planned?  Well this week has been that week!  All of us have been sick.  The older boy started it with a bad ear infection over the weekend.  My daughter started with a headache and soar throat on Tuesday.  I got that from her a few days later.  My husband stayed home on Thursday sick and the baby was diagnosed on Friday with a double ear infection.  So, we did not do nearly as much school as I had planned! Well, now on to our update on what we did do this week in Kindergarten. We continued working on sums up to five.  We did a Lego task card activity, which my daughter loved, to help review what we learned last week.  She built a math problem with her Legos, filled in the number bond and colored in the block strips. We have been learning all about living and non-living things in our science lessons.  We are doing a lot of sorting activities and talking about what makes something a living creature.  The above is one she had to co

So as we go through each day of school, I want to make sure my daughter still knows and understands her numbers 1-30.  We are reviewing each morning with a number of the day. For the number of the day activity, she gets to write the number, the number name and add that many stickers to her little poster.  She then gets to hang the poster by herself to create her own number wall. Here is a picture of what she has done so far: I forgot to have her do day four and she reminded me later that day that she "did not do her number paper to hang up." The best thing about this activity?!  It's free! (Well you have to buy the materials but the idea is completely free!)  We have all these things around the house all the time, plus it helps us use the hoard of stickers we seem to accumulate! If you are teaching your kids about numbers, below are some good resources to reinforce that learning! Learn and recognize the different number representations for the numbers

Week one of Kindergarten is done!  It was a rough week, not because school was stressful or rough, but just life that happened in between. I already wrote two pretty extensive posts on our first two days.  Wednesday did not fair so well.  We did not have any school on Wednesday.  We took a trip to South Carolina and had lunch with daddy at work.  I did not want to try and rush school before or after, so we just took the day off. Thursday was a little better.  We did all our morning work and math, then piled in the car and ventured off to story time at the library.  There is a new story time teacher, but my daughter loved all the new songs and finger plays that she learned.  Afterwards we went to my mother's to visit with my grandmother for a while since she is in town then came home and finished our other lessons. Friday was even more hectic.  My oldest son woke up crying and obviously feeling bad.  I decided he needed to go to the doctor, and good thing, he has a bad ear in

We are still plugging away!  Day two is under our belt and it went quite well! This picture has to be my daughter's favorite part of school.  She loves being able to write on the board herself.  She draws what the weather looks like then works on some review work.   We continued working on our Eureka Math lessons. She has really picked this up quick and I had very little explaining to do. We are still working with beginning sounds.  I am happy with her progress.  She was able to do this sorting activity all on her own, except for asking what some of the pictures were.  The picture cards came from the Mailbox magazines.  I made this set when I was teaching Pre-K in Kentucky.  I'm glad I kept it! We continued with the sight word "we".  I only do one sight word at a time right now.  I started one sight word at a time with her in February this year.  She loves learning words to read.  Since she is struggling so much with phonics, I am glad she is learn

Today marked the first day of Kindergarten.  We took it easy, only doing an activity every so often.  I'm trying to establish a routine so my daughter knows what to expect.  She thrives when there is a routine and I do too. We began by doing some calendar work.  She is still trying to learn her days of the week and months of the year. We then did some review work on the white board.  We are starting over with numbers to make sure she still remembers them all.  I also added a weather component this year since we did not do that during Pre-K.  She enjoyed looking out the window and drawing her own picture! I had looked at a variety of Kindergarten math curricula but most of them she already knew 90% of what was being taught since I taught her all of the number concepts and shapes in Pre-K.  The one I finally settled with, though loosely, was Eureka Math.  It is a free online curriculum.  I am using it as an outline for what I need to teach. This picture shows a g

So I have been playing around with Pinterest and trying to figure things out as all I ever knew about Pinterest was to make and post and repost pins.  I did not know how to do a lot of the fancy stuff so today I took time to learn how to make a pinable picture in my blog post! These CVC word puzzles are a great center activity for those beginning to learn about CVC words and those who are ready to spell them on their own.  There are two versions to use! The larger candy corn puzzles can be mixed and matched to form just about any CVC word.  There is a recording page included to record the puzzles the student creates. The picture cards are for students to spell the word on the cards.  There are 24 different word cards.  Students build the candy corn puzzle in the space provided on the card. I plan to use this center activity closer to Halloween when I plan to introduce CVC words to my daughter.  I'll let you all know how it goes! If you are interested in more informati

 On Saturday, we took the kids out to a sit down restaurant.  This is the first time we ventured to do this with all three kids.  We get there and there is a forty-five minute wait.  We were not leaving.  We had coupons for free kids meals, and we were going to use them before they expired! While my husband stayed at the restaurant with the baby I took the older two to walk around outside.  Not far away from the restaurant is this light house (which I believe is a security tower for the outlet mall).  My daughter has wanted to go see it for a while now since we see it every time we go on the interstate. They were so excited about how tall it was.  I'm sure they would be mesmerized if they saw the one down at the beach.   There was also decorative plants and a fountain next to the lighthouse, so we looked at those for a while before heading back to the restaurant.  We get back to the restaurant to discover they have peanuts.  I don't think my kids