Classroom News

We've had an action packed few weeks! Between the snow and cold days off of school, Groundhog Day, Global Day of Play, the Book Fair, and our class leading the pledge on the morning announcements, we have had so much fun. We are not slowing down anytime soon, with the 100th day of school tomorrow and Valentine's Day on Thursday!

Here are our proud pledge leaders, paired with a few students from Miss Angelico's first grade class. Our kinder friends kindly shared the stage with them after many of them lost opportunities to shine as pledge leaders the week of our three weather closings!

Reading Workshop

We are now working on our next Reading Workshop unit, which focuses on poetry! We learned that when we read poetry, we think about the title and what we see in the illustrations to make predictions. As we read, we make connections and also spot interesting features that poems sometimes have. We think about how the poem looks and how it sounds, as well as how it makes us feel.

In some of the poems we've read so far, we've discovered that poems sometimes have lines that go in directions other than what we typically see to illustrate a concept:

repeat words to sound like a song:

follow a pattern with rhyming words at the end of lines:

or use sound words to help us imagine what we would hear in such a setting:

Writing Workshop

During writing, we continue to work on stretching out words to include beginning, middle, and ending sounds. As we work more closely with vowel rules and word patterns during guided reading groups, we transfer that learning into our writing. We are also pushing ourselves to check our writing and make sure our sentences begin with a capital and end with a punctuation mark, using appropriate spacing in between words.

Math

As we explore shapes in this unit of our math curriculum, we first focused on 3-dimensional shapes, or "solid shapes". We learned that some shapes have flat faces, edges, and corners, and some do not. We also practiced identifying cubes, cones, cylinders, spheres, and pyramids. Next, we worked on describing solid shapes, and identifying which "flat shapes" (such as circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles) were part of each solid shape. We did a fun shape hunt using QR codes where we identified 2D shapes inside of 3D objects found in our everyday lives. We worked in partners to graph our findings!

We also practiced listening for directions, and followed a color code to identify and color shapes inside a picture.

Groundhog Predictions

In honor of Groundhog Day, we read a couple of Groundhog stories and watched a video of Punxsutawney Phil making his prediction. The class was so excited to return to school on Monday and hear that many of them had predicted correctly! Hooray for an early spring!

Global School Play Day

Global School Play Day is intended to bring attention to the importance of unstructured play time to help students foster relationships, practice problem solving skills, innovation, and imagination.  We had a great time learning together through play! When we reflected on our play afterwards, we discussed what sorts of things we learn or practice during unstructured play time with our friends. Students identified discoveries that included playing with students they don't normally play with, solving problems, taking turns, cooperation, counting and colors (with board games), using their imagination through pretend play, and "how to build things", which the kindergarten teacher in me identified as a way to develop our fine motor skills!

All About Me Weeks & Guest Readers

We loved learning more about Olivia! We were excited to have her mom join us to help her share her Me Bag items. She shared with us her Barbie Dreamtopia doll, a beautiful picture of her family, and a microphone that she enjoys singing into!

Mrs. Pemberton was Olivia's special guest reader, and she read Five Little Penguins Slipping on the Ice. We could all relate to this tale with our recent weather conditions!

Gianna was up next, and we learned that she loves Shopkins and Legos, and even has a Squishy that actually smells like a peach! She showed us her soccer trophy, and a sweet photo album with pictures of Baby Gianna and Gianna with her family through the years. So special!

 Gianna's mom joined us with a favorite story from her childhood, that Gianna loves too! This story was about a bunny named Buttermilk, and Gianna even wore her bunny shirt and brought in stuffed Buttermilk characters to show us.

We were excited to learn more about Scarlett next! We learned that she loves to do gymnastics, earned a trophy, and has been in gymnastics for a long time. She shared that her favorite movie is The Sandlot, and one of her favorite Mario characters is Princess Peach. She loves Mario games! She also showed us pictures of her adorable family, and a special picture of her fancy hair styled by her mom!

Scarlett's mom visited us to read the empowering books, Rosie Revere, Engineer, and I Like Myself!

Thanks for reading! Looking forward to another exciting week ahead with our kinders!

Classroom News

Welcome back! I was so excited to see all of my kindergarten friends and hear all about their winter break fun! We have hit the ground running in 2019, and I am looking forward to all we will accomplish together. Some of the highlights of our first two weeks back are below:

Reading Workshop

When we returned from break, we wrapped up our study of fiction books. We focused on story maps to recall the main parts of the story, identifying the character, setting, problem/solution, and events of the story, along with the message or lesson the author was trying to teach us.

We also carefully examined the characters to determine their character traits. We learned that character traits can describe how a character appears on the outside, as well as how they act or feel on the inside.

                                                

 As we identified characters' feelings, we learned that we can use clues from the story as well as our own personal experiences to help us determine how a character is feeling. We are working hard to use descriptive words to describe characters' feelings, beyond saying they are "happy", "sad", or "good".

We also read a special book, The Crayon Box That Talked, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The crayons in the story did not get along, but eventually learned that they each had unique and beautiful qualities that, when joined together, could make amazing pictures that they could not make on their own.

In the LMC, we heard a story about Dr. King's dream, and worked on a Seesaw activity to share what dreams we have.

Writing Workshop

During writing workshop time, we spent time writing about what fun things we did over winter break as well as the following weekend, and practiced making lists. The students were excited to try out another form of writing!

Students also took some time to set personal goals for the new year.  Each student wrote about a specific book, or how many books, they would like to read, a personal goal that they would like to accomplish, and a new food they want to try.  It was so exciting to see the thought and effort put into writing these goals!

This friend explained in her Seesaw recording that she would like to help her dad, read 50 million books (WOW!) and eat more asparagus. 

Math

During our current math unit, our focus is on building concrete knowledge and number sense of the numbers 0-20. Through rhymes, whole group activities, and hands on work with math manipulatives, we are building a stronger understanding of one more and one less. We have worked on putting numbers in order, and determining what number is missing if there is one that is not included in the lineup. Another concept we have been working extensively with is the ten frame. We use ten frames to help us group numbers by fives and tens, and to make a visual representation of a number. This method helps make our thinking about numbers more visual and concrete. It also helps us explain our thinking when we identify numbers as greater than or less/fewer than. 

We also organized groups of objects by counting the items, labeling them with number cards, and then ordering them from least to greatest. Perhaps a favorite of the crowd was a guessing game in which we had to give clues to our friends about the secret number by telling them if the number was greater than or less/fewer than the number they guessed. We use the words "fewer" and "fewest" frequently in the program, although less than comes more naturally to the students. The terms used now will continue to be built upon in first grade, second grade, and so on, so it is important that we learn all of the possible terminology now! We try to use a few different terms to describe- for instance, if a student said the collection of erasers was the smallest collection, we may ask ourselves, "What's another way we could say that?", and identify other words like fewest or less than.

Guided Reading

Our guided reading groups are coming along nicely, and it has been so exciting to see the enthusiasm and feelings of success all of the students are exhibiting in their groups! When I meet with the small groups, we work on a variety of skills, such as word families, vowel rules, reviewing letter sounds and blends, sight words, identifying beginning, middle, and ending sounds, and so on. As we decode our new text, we work together to read and discuss the book. After we have read through the book as a group, we read it independently to practice reading with fluency and expression. Guided reading is another time that we reinforce the comprehension strategies we have learned about during reading workshop time, and apply those to the text at our individual reading levels. Be sure to check the blue book bag in your child's backpack for their reading group books. These books will remain in their blue bags so it is always available for additional reading practice until the next time I meet with their group. 

All About Me Week

This week, Nicole presented us with the first Me Bag of 2019! She shared with us her favorite stuffed animal that can store other things in its belly, and a little pet bird that chirps. We learned about the Bulgarian alphabet with a neat little flip book she brought to teach us about the language her family speaks in addition to English! We know that Nicole loves LOL dolls, and she showed us one of her favorites from her collection, as well as a smiley face ball that is special to her because she received it at a friend's birthday party. Finally, she shared an adorable bear from Great Britain, where her grandfather lives, as it was a special gift from him. 

We loved having Nicole's mom join us to read Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams, featuring the Disney Princesses!

I hope you are all getting out and enjoying the snowy weekend in spite of the cold! Please remember there is no school tomorrow in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. See you on Tuesday!