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Sunday, February 10, 2019

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!