While this end of kindergarten was nothing that any of us ever imagined, I can't stress enough how much they've grown and changed since August... despite not being in the classroom for the last 9 weeks! I can't say thank you enough for continuing to support your child at home and being their other teacher!

I love them so incredibly much and I hope they always know that they have an invisible string to my heart!

Please celebrate them so big this weekend! Kindergarten is a big deal!

We had our final week of our living things unit and the kids did so well researching the animal of their choice and creating an all about book! Most of you sent videos of the books to me, so most of the pictures for this update are the adventures of Flat Ms. Ham & Flat Jace! I'm loving the fun and creative things you've been doing and that Flat Ms. Ham's life is so much more interesting than real Ms. Ham's life right now! :)

Friday was our last community circle and interactive read aloud through Meets due to curbside drop-off and pick-up on Tuesday. We will have our virtual slumber party at 7:30 pm Monday night and I will read 2 books to them then! The whole family is welcome to join in PJs with stuffies and treats. I won't be recording this one, but did pre-record one of the books and it's already on youtube.

Friendly reminder: graduation caps and pictures are due by Tuesday morning so that I can create the collage and put it in the end of year slideshow!

End of year conferences are on Thursday from 8:30-3:00. Just a reminder that you're to call me during your allotted time! It's mainly a celebration of all your child has achieved this year and a couple things I'd like them to work on over summer!

I plan on doing one last weekly update next week with the link to the end of year slideshow and the graduation cap collage. I had a parent generously offer to host a Ham kid party over the summer, but we have to wait until we're allowed to gather in order to formally invite you! I'll save all my thoughts and feelings for next week's update. :)

With SO much love,

Ms. Ham

We continued with our last teacher directed living things animal: owls! We used a lot of higher-order thinking during our read aloud of "Owl Moon" and this seems to be the favorite animal so far. Next week, the kids will pick their own animal to research on pebble go and make an "All About Book."

An optional, but fun project will be arriving to you on Monday if you'd like to participate! Thank you to Mrs. Robison for seeing it, creating it, and putting it all together!

In the envelope with the fun project that somehow arrived at your door, there is also an 8.5x8.5 piece of card stock and a sentence strip for your child's graduation cap. I am all for kid art and the kids owning things typically, but this is moreso a keepsake than an educational task, so I usually suggest that the kids assist where it is appropriate. On the cap, please have: your child's name, what they'd like to be when they grow up, and the year: 2020. If you google images, there are thousands of ideas and you can get very creative if you want or keep it very simple. That is also the background of the top banner on the website if you'd like examples.

Once the cap is created, measure your child's head with the sentence strip and staple it into a circle so that it fits. Then put the card stock face down and tape the sentence strip circle securely to it (the card stock should be at a diagonal/diamond/rhombus, rather than look like a square in orientation- it is in fact a square, but you know what I'm saying!) Please take your child's picture wearing the hat against a neutral wall (you know how I love brick walls! ha!) and send it to me. I will make a collage of all the kids once I have them all.

Lastly: A signup genius for end of year conferences is going out on Monday. MVE is planning on Thursday and Friday, but I was able to fit all of them on Thursday and will close on my condo on Friday (hopefully!). If Thursday won't work for you, please reach out and we will find a different day and time to work with your schedule! Thanks for understanding. :)

With SO much love,

Ms. Ham

I finally feel like we're all in the groove of this remote learning thing! I'm loving check ins and getting to listen to the kids read. They're growing so much at home, so even on those tough days, please know I am so impressed at how much they're achieving outside of the classroom!

This week's living things animal was the elephant! We dug deep into "A Sick Day for Amos McGee" after community circle & I was so impressed with the kids' conversations about comprehension skills.

We had some feedback that the math lessons were too hard to manage with multiple kids and with working from home so moving forward there will be two options:

1. A hands-on activity

OR

2. A worksheet.

I still recommend watching the video if you're opting for the worksheet route. Please do what makes sense for your family!

I just learned that Jan Richardson's "Next Step to Guided Reading" (the books we use for small group reading lessons) are available online & I'm working on getting that set up to share as another resource. I also think I'd like the kids to read those books during check ins. (Especially for our last one so I can pass along the most recent reading level to first grade teachers.)

Have a wonderful weekend in the sunshine!

With SO much love,

Ms. Ham

We continued along with living things this week focusing on coyotes! Our interactive read alouds were so productive and the kids are doing a great job staying engaged and participating. Please make sure you are watching the read aloud if your child isn't able to attend community circle on Tuesday-Friday. We move on to elephants next week with a great read aloud that won a Caldecott medal.

No major changes for next week other than math: we are out of iReady math lessons & Bridges Home Connections lessons, so math will have a bit more of the format we use for writing.

Please make sure you're attending your check ins each week!

With Tri-County moving to "safer at home," I'm looking at dates for our end of year celebration in hopes that we will be able to safely gather in June. Stay tuned!

Thanks again for all that you do! Please continue to send me pictures and videos of the kids. They make me very happy!

With SO much love,

Ms. Ham

We started our living things unit that will last us until the last week of school! It is so much fun & it applies so many skills that the kids have acquired this year when they get to research and make a book about the animal they choose on the last week! We started with bears this week. I loved getting to see so many KWL charts (from the writing mini lesson) and writing journal entries from your PebbleGo research during our check ins!

The check ins were so successful this week & I loved getting that one-on-one time with your kiddo. I want to continue to leave it open for the kids to drive the conversation with work they're proud of, but I'd love if you could also have your kiddo have a book to read to me with any extra time. I was able to provide feedback and help with strategies for the kids who chose to read to me & it was so great for both of us. It's like personalized reading group. If you're looking for leveled readers, you can print the books from raz-kids (password in homework folder) OR reach out to me for suggestions!

If you didn't watch the read alouds on the read aloud calendar this week, I highly recommend it! I loved the book I read on Thursday about the true story of Winnie The Pooh. I also emailed out the interactive read aloud from Thursday called, "The Bear Report." I'm not posting it on here due to privacy restrictions!

Moving forward for next week, we're pretty much in the swing of things without many changes. You'll notice the read aloud calendar is blank, but it will populate as I add the recorded read alouds from community circle each day in case you aren't able to attend community circle. Also, the K team has created a fun & optional ABC countdown to the last day of school. It is underneath the specials calendar, but we're also putting each day on the remote learning calendar moving forward!

Due to our grade level and the time limits set by the district, we will continue to assign Monday’s subject areas like usual with the intent that they are to be done in the afternoon for no more than 3 hours. However, if your child works best in the morning and you would like your half day to be in the morning rather than the afternoon on Mondays, please do what works best for your family’s schedule. Just a reminder: there is no community circle, read aloud, or check-in on Mondays due to teachers being in meetings.

I appreciate all that you do! Give my kiddos extra big hugs for me please!

With SO much love,

Ms. Ham

I am so proud of you guys for working so hard! I love the pictures and videos you're sending! But the highlight of my whole month was definitely the birthday parade to celebrate Cole, Gavin, John, & Emme! It made me so happy to get to see your faces in real life even if I couldn't get tiny people hugs! Thank you for celebrating our kids SO big & so hard. I adore this class.

Hi Families,

THANK YOU for all of the support you've given your child and me at home. I know this is hard for everyone involved and I truly appreciate everything that you're doing. I wanted to share pictures that were sent to me like a typical weekly update to keep some sense of normalcy and also share the survey results with you for transparency!

For next week's remote learning, the K team each recorded a read aloud and uploaded it to YouTube. Underneath the remote learning calendar, you will find the read aloud calendar. Each day there will be a linked video and 3 comprehension questions you can discuss with your child. Also, I saw that a couple of you have "subscribed" to my Youtube channel (what a world we live in these days; never thought those words would come out of my mouth!) and I will continue to add additional read alouds just for fun for families who want more! The specials calendar (2 page document) is underneath the read aloud calendar so there are 3 documents for you from now on!

I will be emailing individual families who said the amount of work was too much or not enough to make sure I'm meeting your child's needs, but the vast majority said it was just right and we were so glad to see that!

I posted this article about crisis schooling on my personal facebook & debated about whether or not to share it with my families, but I think it's so important to read. This is HARD for all of us; and because I love to keep it real... I cried a lot on Friday. I cried because it was supposed to be class picture day. I cried because the weather wasn't nice. I cried because one of our friends sent me an otter book (read aloud coming!) and it was the sweetest. I cried because I'm not used to feeling like I'm not pleasing parents. It was a lot. We are all going to have days like that during this time & I know you're doing the very best you can with your home situation... if that means all you do on a tough day is read & love your babies hard, that's perfect.

I miss them so much & I am so proud of them for working so hard!

With SO much love,

Ms. Ham

We started a new 3 week unit on wants, needs, and money. We started this week with a Laura Numeroff author study with all of her "If You Give A..." books! This was a great introduction to the differences between wants and needs. We have big plans for the weeks after spring break and we will have our own classroom economy where they will earn and spend money.

Our writing this week was responding to a text and writing whether or not we liked the book and WHY (using that big, fancy word because).

We had the best week celebrating Dr. Seuss's birthday (March 2nd)! This week is always one of my favorites because we get to be silly, but the kids realize they can read "REAL" books! :) They're continuously choosing to go to library to read Dr. Seuss beginner books when finished with work early & it makes my teacher heart so happy.

We had a belated week on President's Day because all of kindergarten just wasn't quite ready to be done with wordless picture books as we planned!

We're just about finished with writing "Journey"... we had quite a few kids out with a stomach bug on Thursday & Friday (sanitize everything!!) so I will upload our book once it's all finished and put together!

February was a long month with a lot of snow & indoor recess. We were beyond happy to be outside in the sunshine later in the week. Every time we went out, I would put my arms out like that and soak up the sun... it's become a trend! If you need us, we'll be outside photosynthesizing while we can. :)

We continued working with our wordless picture books this week. The kids have gotten really good at spotting Caldecott Medal Winner books & I love that. Each kindergarten class chose a book to write the words for and our book is "Journey." It's a fantastic book about a girl who is bored because her family is too busy to play, so she goes to her room and finds a red crayon. She draws a door and escapes into an imaginary world where she goes to a castle. The whole book is in sepia tones except for the red things she draws. Then we see a purple bird that gets captured. The girl saves it and sets it free. The bird ends up saving her when she's in danger and she follows it back to a door in a palm tree. When they both go through the door, we meet the boy with a purple crayon who drew the bird. Then they both draw a wheel of a bicycle and ride off together. The kids each have a page or two to author and they're loving the responsibility!

Reminders/Updates:

We continued our fractured fairy tales unit with a book study on "The 3 Little Pigs." It was so hard for us to pick a favorite this week. We loved "The True Story" where the wolf explains how it was all a misunderstanding from baking his granny a birthday cake. We also loved "The 3 Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig!" where they build homes out of the strongest materials (concrete and padlocks, etc), yet the house of flowers is the one that saves the story! We loved "The Three Pigs" where the story gets all mixed up and the characters are outside of the pages of the book. And lastly, we loved "The 3 Little Tamales" where the wolf cries "Ay! Ay! Ayyyy!"

On Wednesday, we created engineering plans to build homes for the little pigs and wrote about them in our journals. On Thursday, we engineered and built the homes in real life and then took turns being the big bad wolf to try to huff and puff and blow the houses down. Most of our pigs survived & they LOVED this.

We started a new literacy unit this week on fractured fairy tales & we are OBSESSED. It's a favorite unit of mine & the excitement is apparently contagious. We started off with the original, "Goldilocks & The Three Bears," and then read, "Goldilocks and Just the One Bear," (this was our favorite- a bear is lost in the city and goes into an apartment home and eats porridge, sits on things, and sleeps in beds... when the family comes home, the momma person thinks all these things are familiar & asks if he's Baby Bear! It was Goldilocks's home all grown up!), "Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs," and finally, "Goldirocks and the Three Bears." We were inspired to come up with our own versions of Goldilocks and the Three _____ during writing and the kids loved getting to be creative.

We spent the entire week reading non-fiction texts about Martin Luther King Jr. and having very important conversations about why his dream was so powerful. We loved learning about his life and talking about how we don't pick friends based on how they LOOK, but rather how they treat us. I always start with talking about my teacher friends and how Ms. Slinkard has blond hair and I have brown hair. The kids really take off with this concept when we talk about the things that make us different and special (glasses, hair color, freckles, eye color, etc.) and how it's just crazy to not play with someone based on any of these things. We have always appreciated our different skin colors and use our "people colors" crayons and colored pencils during writing and drawing, so this was nothing new! :)

We were so happy to be back in room 17 on Tuesday! We loved sharing about our breaks during community circle. One of my absolute favorite activities we do in the new year is a More/Less writing activity. It's a great review of math and their answers are always precious.

We did an author study focusing on Jan Brett! We started with "The Mitten" and moved to "The Hat," "Gingerbread Friends," and ended with "The Wild Christmas Reindeer." The kids were so thrown off with the Gingerbread and said, "I thought we were done with gingerbread!" Always keepin' me in check.

We had a super fun week in math with non-standard measurement. We've been working on vocabulary words such as: shorter than, the same as, longer than.

We had a crazy last two weeks finishing up our gingerbread unit and doing lots of holiday read alouds and activities. We loved our STEAM time dissolving and disintegrating our gingerbread cookies. We also loved making our gingerbread ornaments with Mrs. Grotts and Dr. Taylor!

We went on a hunt through the school when a gingerbread man left clues in our classroom! We had gingerbread man cookies waiting at our desks when we returned from our hunt. We took our first bites and graphed where we bit!

We also made a HUGE graph of our favorite gingerbread version during community circle one day!

We celebrated our 300th paw card with an ice cream making party thanks to Ms. Heather's ice cream machine and the kids loved getting to help put everything in!

We had so much fun at our holiday party & the sing along on Thursday!

We are so invested in our gingerbread unit! The kids beg to read "one more" version and love signing to me when things are the same or different as I'm reading... whether it's a character, the setting, or an event! But of course, it's the most fun to predict whether or not our gingerbread character will survive! We loved our gingerbread write the room, felt, & QR code centers. STEAM was also gingerbread themed: they had to create something to help their gingerbread get across the river. We've talked a lot about why cookies can't go in the river & they shocked me with huge vocabulary words like disintegrate & dissolve! :) We are having SO much fun.

Hi families! I hope you've been enjoying your break from school & Thanksgiving holiday with your families and friends. I will try not to be TOO sentimental during this update, but we spent our week leading up to break reading all of my favorite Thanksgiving books and doing so many sweet activities.

We had a ton of fun and different writing and reading centers this week, mainly revolving around food and environmental print (things they read/write in daily life!)

We continued learning about boys and girls of long ago vs. boys and girls today. We specifically focused on the Pilgrims and their clothes, homes, and food.

We loved sharing our turkeys in disguise on Friday & writing about them. We also got ready for our Thanksgiving feast in STEAM by making Turkey hats.

We've continued writing groups & our days have really found a good rhythm! The kids loved our 2 new work station games this week: "grab bag more or less" and "bicycle race" (focuses on doubles).

I am feeling extra thankful for this sweet crew this year! I am so incredibly proud of how hard they work, but more importantly: how kind they are to one another. I had our room mom help with adding their fingerprints to my tree, so I had our friends who went to Ms. Mamay come back to add theirs too and watching them hug them and welcome them back was the best.

I hope to see many of you at our Thanksgiving Feast on Wednesday at 11:05!

With the beginning of November, we've started a social studies unit about long ago & today. We researched on PebbleGo and GetEpic about schools, homes, toys, and other parts of our lives to compare things that are different, as well as the same. The favorite so far has been toys! Shocking, I'm sure! We will continue reading and researching next week.

We had a crazy week with delayed start on Monday, slow release Tuesday, a snow day Wednesday, Halloween Thursday, & a fire drill on Friday! This was truly a week where we just had to embrace the crazy, but we still got so much learning done and had a lot of fun!

I hope you all had wonderful fall breaks! We loved getting to share during community circle. With the start of 2nd quarter, we're focusing a lot on learning goals. We've been talking about scales and the work we need to do in order to be at a "3" on the scale! We did this through read alouds on pumpkins this week. The kids are so into this & their favorite read aloud was Pumpkin Soup.

For the past 2 weeks, we've switched gears to earth science: weather! We loved reading so many nonfiction books to learn about different types of weahter, but extreme weather like hurricanes and tornadoes were definitely our favorites. With it being October, we've also been doing a lot of "spooky" writing and reading with witch fingers during reading groups!

We focused on concepts of print for this unit: noticing whether the book had illustrations or pictures (sometimes illustrations can be confusing because not all nonfiction books use photographs!), glossaries, tables of contents, captions, close ups, and labels.

We started a new unit based on literacy standards that identify and compare the key components of fiction and nonfiction books! We're doing this through apples! We read fiction stories about apples this week & will move to nonfiction texts about apples next week and compare the two. Our favorite read aloud this week was definitely, "A Friend For Dragon!" The main character thinks his apple can talk to him because a snake plays a trick on him & the kids LOVED it.

We've been doing so many extra fun things for the FunRun: free choice time, pajama & stuffies day, extra recess, etc! The Boosterthon has character video clips that we watch each day and one of the days was about gratitude. I decided we needed to read one of my favorite books, "Penguin Problems" and we made a chart of what we are grateful for that day!

Our wonderful room moms helped us make the cutest fun run shirts on Tuesday! (THANK YOU!)

FUN RUN INFO: The fun run is Monday, 9/23 at 9:30. Families are welcome and encouraged to attend. Your child should come to school wearing sunscreen & athletic clothes/footwear! I kept their shirts and they will either put the shirt over the shirt they have on or change. Please make sure they have a water bottle! This weekend is the final push for pledges & usually Ham kids are in last, but we're in 2nd this year! They're awfully close to me having to buy pizza for a pizza party and if they get to $200 per lap, they get to pie me in the face! :)

We had another great week focused around critical literacy/growth mindset! Our read alouds were: "What Do You Do With A Problem?" "What Do You Do With A Chance?" "What Do You Do With An Idea?" and "Ish." They led to amazing conversations about how we do HARD things in kindergarten and there's a lot of things we can't do... YET!

We had the BEST first full week & I just love this crew so much already! We're still taking it slow to build our classroom community, but we're very much into our routines now! We do community circles every day and have been playing games like "Just Like Me!" to find friends who have things in common with us, but also acknowledging our differences! Our main read aloud this week was: "Pete the Cat: Rockin' in My School Shoes!" and we had a very shoe-filled week in reading and math!