100th Day of School!

Wow! We have made it to the 100th day of school!  What a milestone for our Kindergartners!  So much learning and growing has happened in these 100 days.  I can't wait to see what the rest of the school year brings!

We had a fun day celebrating the number 100! We began by making 100th day crowns.  The children colored in 100 stars on their crowns!!  We had a delicious Hiyaku (Japanese for 100) trail mix snack!  The children enjoyed finding their favorite treats in there: marshmallows, jellybeans, chocolate chips, goldfish crackers, raisins, and pretzels.  We also had a visit from Zero the Hero!  Zero the Hero was here to talk about the importance of the number zero when making bigger numbers like 100.  Ask your child to tell you about our new friend Zero the Hero!  We finished our day by reading a few 100th day stories and playing a game called Race to $1.00.  This game involved counting pennies and making trades for dimes and then making a final trade for $1.00.  Ask your child how many pennies you need to make $1.00!

During theme, we continued to learn about many new sea creatures.  This week we learned about the Hatchet Fish, Jelly fish, Gulper Eel, Puffer Fish, and Viper Fish.  These were some very interesting creatures!  We continued our class study of penguins and added more to our penguin reports.  This week we learned about the nonfiction features maps, diagram, close up, and table of contents.  We then used these features in our books as we wrote about what penguins look like, where they live, and what they eat.  We also added a fun fact about penguins.  What was your child's fun fact?

Next week during Reader's Workshop, we will begin Guided Reading Groups.  During this time, I will be working with the children in small groups on reading strategies and reading fluency.  While I am meeting with groups, the other children will be participating in reading stations.  The three stations we will be doing are Starfall.com on the ipads, sight word games, and independent reading from book boxes.  This week we practiced the stations so that the children will be independent when I am working with groups.  We are looking forward to trying out Reading Groups and Reading Stations next week!

In math, we learned several new shape Work Places:  Pattern Block Designs, Geoboard Shapes, and Shapes and Spinners Graphing. Each of these new activities encouraged us to look at the attributes of shapes and gave us a chance to practice drawing shapes. Some of the shapes, like a hexagon and rhombus, were tricky to draw!

Have a wonderful weekend!