Wow, busy busy week! Basically the whole of February is pretty non-stop action for our little folks, as we prepare for our class performance on the 24th and look forward to our field trip on Thursday. Stay posted for permission slips coming home Monday! We meant to send them home Friday, but forgot just how crazy Valentine’s Day is in Kindergarten…. Oops!
Here’s the scoop on our week:
Literacy: Our munchkins are really getting into the reading groove, and we love seeing their growing confidence! We did some intensive work this week practicing reading words containing blends and digraphs, such as “brag,” “glad,” and “shop.” We’ve also begun exploring long vowel patterns, with a couple of whole-group lessons on the magic e spelling. We do not expect all the students to master this concept, but still provide exposure to the whole class so they can begin to build on it going forward as they are ready. Our sight word this week was “said.” Starting next week, we will begin learning 2 sight words per week! Since this is an increased level of challenge for the students, some of them may require a little extra practice. If needed, we will begin sending home rings of flashcards to support your child’s practice with you as homework.
Math: This last week has seen our Kindergartners familiarize themselves with measuring, tally marks and data handling! As well as celebrating Valentines day and using our numbers to find our friend’s bags and deliver our goodies!
We started out the week reviewing nonstandard measuremeant and measured the promethean board with a cut out of Mrs. K’s foot, a child’s foot and a ruler which, of course, shows an actual “foot”! We also read How Big Is a Foot? The story was great and it made us realize that we need standard measures to measure objects or things can go wrong! After reading the story we practiced measuring with things around the room with a ruler and we learnt that we can measure in inches and feet! We will be reviewing how to measure with a ruler (putting the object measured at the beginning of the ruler) in our next few Math Stations. Feel free to measure things around your house if you have a ruler, your children love it!
Towards the end of the week we introduced tally marks, finding out that when we hit 5 we make number 5 cross 1,2,3 and 4! We are learning a song to go with this too. We used tally marks to make lists of our favorite rainforest animals and to make lists of our pets.
Our Math Stations over the last week include:
Science: We are hard at work learning our songs for our Animal Extravaganza class performance later this month! One of them directly relates to our study of the rainforest… the other two are just for fun. Your children have began working on memorizing their poetry (written by our own Ms. G!) for the performance as well.
Beyond the classroom: Our classroom works hard to develop a deep sense of community, as well as a sense of gratitude for the people who work hard to make our lives better, and Valentine’s Day offers a great chance for us to highlight both! The students each chose a member of our community (ranging from the nurses, to our specialist teachers, to our administrative staff) and painstakingly hand-made and decorated a Valentine for that person. Then, the whole class “expeditioned” around our campus, delivering our missives of love and appreciation…. accompanied by big hugs of course! It was a sweet time of caring, on the holiday that celebrates caring!
In other news: This week we enjoyed a time of community with our February EL Assembly, celebrating student birthdays and the classroom adventures of the Pre-K students. We are looking forward to April, when Kindergarten will have a turn in the spotlight!
Big thanks to our Mystery Reader, Brody's mom Ellie! Also thanks to Truman’s mom, Virginia, and Luke’s mom, Kim, for coming in Wednesday to work with the kids on their class art project for the gala auction. It’s going to be awesome! Thank you as well to our lovely Valentine’s Party volunteers, Ellie, Andrea, Cami, Julianne, and Lexi! The kids had a truly fabulous time playing games, making a craft, stuffing one another’s bags with Valentines, and enjoying a special homemade treat. :)
Here’s the scoop on our week:
Literacy: Our munchkins are really getting into the reading groove, and we love seeing their growing confidence! We did some intensive work this week practicing reading words containing blends and digraphs, such as “brag,” “glad,” and “shop.” We’ve also begun exploring long vowel patterns, with a couple of whole-group lessons on the magic e spelling. We do not expect all the students to master this concept, but still provide exposure to the whole class so they can begin to build on it going forward as they are ready. Our sight word this week was “said.” Starting next week, we will begin learning 2 sight words per week! Since this is an increased level of challenge for the students, some of them may require a little extra practice. If needed, we will begin sending home rings of flashcards to support your child’s practice with you as homework.
Math: This last week has seen our Kindergartners familiarize themselves with measuring, tally marks and data handling! As well as celebrating Valentines day and using our numbers to find our friend’s bags and deliver our goodies!
We started out the week reviewing nonstandard measuremeant and measured the promethean board with a cut out of Mrs. K’s foot, a child’s foot and a ruler which, of course, shows an actual “foot”! We also read How Big Is a Foot? The story was great and it made us realize that we need standard measures to measure objects or things can go wrong! After reading the story we practiced measuring with things around the room with a ruler and we learnt that we can measure in inches and feet! We will be reviewing how to measure with a ruler (putting the object measured at the beginning of the ruler) in our next few Math Stations. Feel free to measure things around your house if you have a ruler, your children love it!
Towards the end of the week we introduced tally marks, finding out that when we hit 5 we make number 5 cross 1,2,3 and 4! We are learning a song to go with this too. We used tally marks to make lists of our favorite rainforest animals and to make lists of our pets.
Our Math Stations over the last week include:
- Making addition number stories with Mrs K - We made our own addition number stories and had stories involving everything from scarlet macaws to broccoli zombies! We will be collating all our stories and making them into a book that we will take turns in bringing home!
- Addition Snakes - where you have playdough snake mats with addition sentences that have only one number on and the answer, the children had to add playdough balls to the mats until they got to the answer.
- Honeycomb problem solving- where you have a honeycomb shape made up of hexagons, trapezoids and triangles. You then roll a die and add the shape to your mat, in some cases having to move around the shapes you already have so that they can fit within the honeycomb.
- Rainforest measuring- where you measure rainforest animals with leaves (non standard measures) to find out which one is the longest/shortest.
- Bowling- probably the most popular station of all!!! The focus being to knock down the pins and find out how many we had left. We started with 10 and every time we knocked the pins down or didn’t (in some cases we didn’t knock any down) we completed the number sentences.
- Dime Spill- where the children had three dimes in a small cup and spilled the cup, recoding how many times they got heads or tails with tally marks
- Superhero Top It - where children had cards with ten blocks and ones and had to take turns picking them up, the person with the highest number gets both cards, the cards are then counted at the end to see who had the most
- i pads - where the children chose between a shape game or counting game
Science: We are hard at work learning our songs for our Animal Extravaganza class performance later this month! One of them directly relates to our study of the rainforest… the other two are just for fun. Your children have began working on memorizing their poetry (written by our own Ms. G!) for the performance as well.
Beyond the classroom: Our classroom works hard to develop a deep sense of community, as well as a sense of gratitude for the people who work hard to make our lives better, and Valentine’s Day offers a great chance for us to highlight both! The students each chose a member of our community (ranging from the nurses, to our specialist teachers, to our administrative staff) and painstakingly hand-made and decorated a Valentine for that person. Then, the whole class “expeditioned” around our campus, delivering our missives of love and appreciation…. accompanied by big hugs of course! It was a sweet time of caring, on the holiday that celebrates caring!
In other news: This week we enjoyed a time of community with our February EL Assembly, celebrating student birthdays and the classroom adventures of the Pre-K students. We are looking forward to April, when Kindergarten will have a turn in the spotlight!
Big thanks to our Mystery Reader, Brody's mom Ellie! Also thanks to Truman’s mom, Virginia, and Luke’s mom, Kim, for coming in Wednesday to work with the kids on their class art project for the gala auction. It’s going to be awesome! Thank you as well to our lovely Valentine’s Party volunteers, Ellie, Andrea, Cami, Julianne, and Lexi! The kids had a truly fabulous time playing games, making a craft, stuffing one another’s bags with Valentines, and enjoying a special homemade treat. :)