Mrs. Fink's Kindergarten Class: Winter Fun and the 100th Day of School

The Mitten

To go along with our winter theme, we read two different versions of "The Mitten." One version was written by Jan Brett, while the other version was written by Alvin Tresselt. Our class decided to compare the two stories and we discussed the similarities and differences between the books. We made a Venn diagram that was shaped like two mittens; students had to place pictures of characters and items from the stories on the correct spot on the mittens.

This is our completed Venn diagram. We discovered that both versions of "The Mitten" had a bear, a fox, a rabbit, a mouse, and a boy. Those characters are in the middle where both mittens intersect. The other characters and items such as the frog, cricket, wild board, and yellow mitten pertained to the Alvin Tresselt version. The mole, hedgehog, badger, and white mitten went with the Jan Brett version of "The Mitten."

In both "Mitten" stories, animals seek shelter in a mitten to escape from the cold and snow. The mitten stretches and stretches as more animals squeeze inside. We started to think, if we had our own mittens, what kind of animals might fit inside? Students drew a picture of what they would fit inside their mittens. They got pretty creative!

Winter Fun

Continuing with our winter theme, we made our own snowflakes in class--not enough to get a snow day, though! We took pipe cleaners and cut them into thirds. After that, we twisted the pipe cleaners together to make a snowflake. Next, we tied our snowflakes to a popsicle stick in order to suspend them in cups.

We mixed hot water, Borax, and blue food coloring in our plastic cups. The Borax was a solid, which dissolved in our liquid (the water). Our class talked about the states of matter and what was happening in our cups. Finally, we placed our pipe cleaner snowflakes in our solutions and we would check on them the following day.

Students made predictions for what they thought might happened. Some students thought the pipe cleaners would change color because of the food coloring. Some thought the solution would freeze the pipe cleaners, and others thought nothing would happen.

The following morning, we checked on our snowflakes. The Borax had crystallized on the pipe cleaners! They really did look like snowflakes!

In math, we have been practicing grouping things into tens and skip counting by fives and tens. Our class had been collecting milk jugs in order to build an igloo. We decided to take our milk jugs and put them into groups of ten (arranging them to look like a tens frame) in order to skip count by tens.

We had over 100 milk jugs and began constructing our igloo. Thank you everyone for sending in your milk jugs!

After collecting more milk jugs, here is our finished product!

This week, we celebrated a couple of birthdays.

Happy birthday, Alex!

Happy birthday, Aidan!

The 100th Day of School

We took a group picture on the 100th day of school! We look 100 days older and smarter since the first day of school. :)

Here is a silly picture we took!

We did lots of fun activities to celebrate the 100th day of school. I challenged everyone to hold a smile for 100 seconds. It was a lot harder than it looks!

We got up and moved and danced for 100 seconds!

At one of our centers, we had sorting mats and sorted 100 buttons in different ways. In this picture, a few students sorted 100 buttons by color and placed them into groups of ten.

Our class talked about what we might look like if we were 100 years old. Everyone drew a picture of what they might look like if they were 100, and they wrote a sentence to go with it.

In math, we have been learning about fractions. We did some "pancake math" in order to explore fractions some more. I called over small groups of students and presented them with a plate of ten pancakes that I had just made. Their goal was to evenly distribute the pancakes so that everyone got the same amount.

It got a little tricky when we realized there weren't enough pancakes for everyone to get three whole ones. We tried to brainstorm how we would solve this problem. Someone suggested that I make more pancakes. Another student suggested that we split the two pancakes in half and everyone would get a half. One of the groups of students had to split one pancake into thirds.