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Saturday, November 24, 2018

Classroom News


I hope everyone is enjoying the last bit of Thanksgiving Break! I am so thankful for my sweet kindergarten class and their families. These little friends bring so much joy and wonder to my days- it is a gift to see the world through their eyes as they learn and explore! Their excitement about learning is contagious!

We are also very thankful for our Veterans! We had a special morning honoring family members and local Veterans at our Veterans Day program.

                                       










Math

We have just completed the unit on size, length, and weight comparison in math. During this unit, we focused on ordering objects by size, length, and weight, comparing sizes using words like bigger/smaller, shorter/longer, and heavier/lighter. We had a great time with many of the hands on activities to practice using this vocabulary in our math discussions.


I had to chuckle when I called on this friend to identify the lightest fruit in the picture, and she pointed to the cherries, as she wore a cherry headband! What a fun coincidence!


 Reading

We are continuing to explore features of books and what makes a successful reader during reading workshop time. We learned about the differences between fiction and nonfiction, and practiced sorting the books in our book bins into fiction or nonfiction piles.


We also spent time learning how to retell a story using specific words to start our sentences and keep our retelling on track, making sure to include all of the important events in a story!


We practiced having conversations with books with our turn and talk partners, identifying a thought or idea about a book, and then agreeing or disagreeing with our partner, and sharing our reasoning. Disagreeing about books is something that we learn to discuss respectfully and that it's okay to have differing ideas about what we are reading.


Punctuation marks are another feature of books that we are focusing on and learning how to change our reading depending on what type of punctuation mark we come across in a sentence. 

LMC

During LMC, we learned how to login to Freckle, and completed a pretest to help direct our individual learning on the site. We will be sending information home soon on how to use Freckle at home!

The book, Bob, Not Bob sparked a funny conversation for us about ways we can prevent the spread of germs! After the story, we sorted pictures into two categories- preventing germs and spreading germs.





Word Study & Writing Workshop



Our most recent word study focus was on clapping and identifying the number of syllables in a word. During writing workshop time, we wrote about a place we would like to go, and practiced labeling a picture. This is such an important step of our writing routine, and one that is sometimes forgotten! 

Zones of Regulation

Our latest Zones of Regulation lesson focused on identifying the size of a problem. We learned that the size of our reaction to a problem should match the size of the problem!



All About Me Weeks


We loved learning more about our friend, Sara! She shared with us some of her favorite collections, like her LOL dolls and Shopkins. She also showed us her favorite toy car, and a beautiful painting she did. She is quite an artist!

Andrew was next, and he shared with us a picture of him with his brothers, money from China, and a windmill that came with him from Ohio, where he lived before moving here! He also brought a book that is special to him, Andrew and the Superhero. He rounded out his presentation with his favorite pen and favorite toy car.

 We enjoyed having Andrew's dad visit us to read the silly story, There was an Old Lady who Swallowed Some Leaves!

I will leave you with two more pictures- one from Crazy Hair Day and these cuties enjoying the snow during recess one day!


Thanks for reading, and see you Monday!

Monday, November 5, 2018

Classroom News

How cute are these kindergarten friends in costume? We had a fabulous parade and celebration! Thank you to all of our parent volunteers as well as our parent audience for the parade that made it a special day for everyone.





 











 

 
  

 










Reading Workshop

In our most recent reading workshop lessons, we spent time thinking about who we are as readers. As we explored various genres, we discovered that we are all unique readers who have different interests in books! Some of us like poetry books, while others enjoy books about animals. Some of us were excited about dinosaur books, and others love fairy tales. Identifying these favorites will help us choose books that are a good fit for us, but we learned that it is also important to try different kinds of books to see what else is out there that we may enjoy! Thank you so much for helping your kindergartener fill out the reading survey on their book preferences. These will come in handy as we begin selecting books for our individual book bins that we use for independent reading time during reading workshop. We have also spent time identifying the differences between a letter, a word, and a sentence. We know that letters go together to make words, and we leave spaces between words so we know where one word ends and another begins. When we write sentences, we signal to our reader that we are starting a new sentence with a capital at the beginning, and that the sentence is finished when there is a period or other ending mark. This tied in nicely with our word study lesson about identifying beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words.




Writing Workshop

This stretching of words that we practiced during word study ties in nicely to our writing workshop lessons as well, as we label our pictures and write our sentence about the picture we've drawn. Sometimes our labels have only a beginning letter, and as the year goes on, we will work to add a middle and ending sound.


Math

We just finished our second math unit, where we continued to work extensively with numbers to 10. We have been comparing numbers and collections, and identifying differences and similarities.  We have been pairing sets of objects with numbers, and comparing sets of objects using one to one matching. This also lends itself nicely to work with one more or one less types of number stories. Our next focus will be on ordering objects by size, length, and weight.

                                        

Zones of Regulation

We revisited the Zones of Regulation to talk a bit more in depth about the zones. First, we sorted incidents that could happen throughout our day that may move us from the green zone. We worked together to identify which zone we might end up in if that incident happened to us. Next, we identified strategies we could use to return to the green zone, ready to learn! One of the strategies we focused on was the Take a Break station. We can go to the Take a Break station if we are feeling we need a minute to remove ourselves from the task at hand and return in the green zone. At our take a break station, we have calming cards, a bean bag chair, sensory bottles, coloring supplies, fidgets, and play dough to help us. We are also learning how to appropriately use the Take a Break station without taking advantage of it! 



LMC

Prior to Halloween, we listened to the story, Creepy Pair of Underwear by Aaron Reynolds, illustrated by Peter Brown. After this funny story, we created our own creepy underwear!




Student of the Week

Rhett was the most recent student to share his All About Me bag, and we loved learning more about him! He shared some wonderful photos of his family and told us about them and their fun adventures together. We learned that he is a huge fan of Joanna Gaines, and his family has found some yummy taco recipes in her magazine. Rhett loves tacos! He also shared that he enjoys reading Llama Llama books, and science is his favorite subject. We had many giggles when Rhett's mom came in to read us the story, Not a Box




Centers

Our latest round of centers has been full of fun literacy, math, and fine motor practice! We had a listening center about a runaway pumpkin, a play dough uppercase and lowercase letter matching activity, and another play dough activity where we rolled numbers of pumpkins up to ten. The other centers were a name writing practice center where we used a spinner to determine our writing tool, and a letter/color matching center where we drew cards to match a color to write our letter with on the recording sheet.






Thanks for reading!