Welcome back from Spring Break! I hope everyone had the opportunity to relax and make memories together.
It was such a pleasure meeting with all of you at spring conferences! This group of kinders have much to be proud of. We worked right up until Spring Break- a few of our highlights are below:
We did a few special themed literacy and math centers for St. Patrick's Day, as well as St. Patrick's Day writing about what we would do if we were leprechauns!
We are wrapping up our Reading Workshop instruction on poetry, and used poems to practice comprehension skills that apply to all types of text. We identified words and phrases that jump out at us and help us make mental images and visualize what we were reading.
We also worked together to figure out unfamiliar words by using pictures, thinking about what was happening in the poem, trying a different word in it's place to see if it makes sense, and using words that come before and after the tricky word as clues.
As we studied poetry in Reading Workshop, we also carried this over to our Writing Workshop time, as we learned about acrostic poems and wrote our own Spring acrostic poems!
During math, we have been working with numbers from 1-100, specifically focusing on place value. We have introduced the tens and ones place with connecting cubes, and learned how we can use the tens groups to count the total more quickly.
We have also discovered that knowing the tens and ones place can help us to write two digit numbers, by writing the number of tens towers in the tens place, and the number of individual cubes in the ones place.
Another concept we've been practicing is transitioning between each group of tens. For instance, from 58, 59, to 60, 61, and so on.
I've been so pleased to see what wonderful progress the students have made as readers. In our Guided Reading groups, we have a chance to work on certain decoding and comprehension strategies, depending on the needs of the group. When I'm meeting with Guided Reading groups, the rest of the class is working independently on a task such as short vowel work with CVC words or place value exercises, followed by the option to read from their book bins or work with our "Dessert Tubs". Dessert Tubs provide hands on activities for students to work on, including writing, math, word work, or activities to build fine motor skills. We are working hard to build our stamina for independent work and independent or partner reading, which will help us prepare for more independence in first grade. We have come a long way!
Before break, we celebrated Denys and loved learning about him! He brought a Rubik's cube that he solved, two of his favorite Beyblades, and his favorite Skylander. He also showed us a really cool amethyst rock he got when he visited a cave.
We were excited to have Denys's mom join us to read a story about one of our favorite characters, Pete the Cat Rockin' in my School Shoes!
We had fun listening to Kelson's mom read us the funny story, Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? by Dr. Seuss. There were so many fun animal noises to be made!
It was fun to see so many of my kinder friends at the Dryden Family Reading Night! My daughter Brynn joined in the fun and was excited to see all of my big kids!
To celebrate Intergenerational Day, the district had various community members visit our schools to present on a topic. We attended a presentation on Therapy Dogs, and loved meeting Lucy the black lab, and learning about the important work she does at Northwest Community Hospital.
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