Hello everyone!
Wow, we can’t believe it’s May already! The fun and learning is continuing at full-speed, and we are loving watching your little people mature and grow. Here’s what we have been up to:
Literacy:
Workstations and reading lessons continue unabated! This week we added a new sight word practicing the “or” spelling pattern we learned last week – “before.” It’s our longest sight word yet, which made it doubly exciting. ;) We also focused on differentiating between the sound /tr/ and the sound /ch/ which can often be confusing for kindergarteners. For example, kids at this age frequently say/spell “tree” as “chree,” “train” as “chrain,” and so on. Say them aloud and you will quickly see that the spoken phonemes (especially when you add in a little bit of a Southern twang) really are remarkably similar! We practiced enunciating these tricky words more carefully, and sorted picture cards beginning with those sounds.
Math:
This week we continued to count our money and extended our counting skills by counting quarters. While counting our quarters we found out that we need a set amount to make a dollar. Ask your children how many quarters make a dollar and see what they say!
First we counted the quarters by listening to them drop in a bucket stopping every time we heard the fourth one drop. Then we put them in a bag labelled with $1 and wrote a tally for every dollar we counted. We found that we have so many quarters to count we could make things easier by counting 8 at a time. We knew that 4 quarters make a dollar and now we know that 8 makes 2!!
We continued to play with making different numbers, using two digits. This time we used a pack of cards in small groups and picked two cards each. The person who made the biggest number with their cards won everybodys cards. The children loved it!
Our Math Stations this week were a continuation of last weeks Stations.
Science:
We’re loving our study of the ocean! We have already learned lots of weird and cool facts, such as… did you know that coral is actual an animal? The visible / hard part of coral is its skeleton, which it wears on the outside of its body. The organism inside reaches tentacles out to grab food, and then drags the food inside the coral to eat it. And a coral reef actually mostly consists of ancient dead skeletons all stuck together, and only the layer on the surface is actually living coral. Say whaaaaaat? ;)
In other news:
Happy Mother’s Day to all of our lovely class mothers! The kids had a great time decorating a special surprise for you, and also came home with a card and a “My Mother Is….” page. J Hopefully none of it got lost in transit! Big thanks to our Parent Academic Helper, Luke’s mom Kim, who did an awesome job helping the kids practice their sight words with our Jenga game!
Have a great weekend!
Wow, we can’t believe it’s May already! The fun and learning is continuing at full-speed, and we are loving watching your little people mature and grow. Here’s what we have been up to:
Literacy:
Workstations and reading lessons continue unabated! This week we added a new sight word practicing the “or” spelling pattern we learned last week – “before.” It’s our longest sight word yet, which made it doubly exciting. ;) We also focused on differentiating between the sound /tr/ and the sound /ch/ which can often be confusing for kindergarteners. For example, kids at this age frequently say/spell “tree” as “chree,” “train” as “chrain,” and so on. Say them aloud and you will quickly see that the spoken phonemes (especially when you add in a little bit of a Southern twang) really are remarkably similar! We practiced enunciating these tricky words more carefully, and sorted picture cards beginning with those sounds.
Math:
This week we continued to count our money and extended our counting skills by counting quarters. While counting our quarters we found out that we need a set amount to make a dollar. Ask your children how many quarters make a dollar and see what they say!
First we counted the quarters by listening to them drop in a bucket stopping every time we heard the fourth one drop. Then we put them in a bag labelled with $1 and wrote a tally for every dollar we counted. We found that we have so many quarters to count we could make things easier by counting 8 at a time. We knew that 4 quarters make a dollar and now we know that 8 makes 2!!
We continued to play with making different numbers, using two digits. This time we used a pack of cards in small groups and picked two cards each. The person who made the biggest number with their cards won everybodys cards. The children loved it!
Our Math Stations this week were a continuation of last weeks Stations.
Science:
We’re loving our study of the ocean! We have already learned lots of weird and cool facts, such as… did you know that coral is actual an animal? The visible / hard part of coral is its skeleton, which it wears on the outside of its body. The organism inside reaches tentacles out to grab food, and then drags the food inside the coral to eat it. And a coral reef actually mostly consists of ancient dead skeletons all stuck together, and only the layer on the surface is actually living coral. Say whaaaaaat? ;)
In other news:
Happy Mother’s Day to all of our lovely class mothers! The kids had a great time decorating a special surprise for you, and also came home with a card and a “My Mother Is….” page. J Hopefully none of it got lost in transit! Big thanks to our Parent Academic Helper, Luke’s mom Kim, who did an awesome job helping the kids practice their sight words with our Jenga game!
Have a great weekend!