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!