Shelburne Farms!

 We had a wonderful visit to Shelburne Farms on Monday! We were lucky to squeeze this trip in before the rainy weather settled in for the week.  We went to Shelburne Farms as a introduction to our upcoming Community Unit because it is a part of our community, but also it allowed us to work together as a community to make a vegetable soup!  As a class, we were in charge of chopping the carrots and the celeriac for the soup.  Everyone did such a great job, carefully chopping the vegetables.  We also had a visit to the farmyard, explored the forest, made butter to enjoy with some bread, took a tractor ride, and lastly, tried our soup!  Enjoy some pictures from the day!

We had a very exciting first this week....Writer's Workshop! Each child was given a Talking, Drawing, Writing Notebook.During .  These are notebooks we will be using to tell, illustrate, and write our stories throughout the year.  We are beginning by creating detailed illustrations to tell our stories.  As I confer with children, I ask questions about their drawings and stories, encouraging them to add more detail (hair, clothes, weather, etc) so that their readers really understand what is happening in the story.  We have loots of stories to tell and pictures to illustrate...I can't wait to see more from these writers!



In math, we continue to work on numeral formation (8 and 9); however, this week we also worked with patterns.  We created patterns using ourselves and patterns with animal noises.  It was like an animal chorus!  We read the book Mrs. Wishy Washy and then used those animals to help us create some patterns.  Then we used unifix cubes to copy and extend patterns.  We even learned that some patterns are named by letters, such as ABABAB or ABCABC.  Can your child demonstrate a pattern for you at home?




We also began Reader's Workshop this week!  We added another Let's Find out Magazine to our book boxes after reading it aloud together.  This week's magazine was about counting apples.  The children are very excited about their books and now we are working on identifying ourselves as readers!  We learned this week that we are readers who can look at words, think about the words, read the words, and learn from them.  We took a walk through our hallway looking for words.  We looked at the words and what they were labeling and used a best guess to read them. We saw that we could actually read more words than we thought we could!  Way to go Kindergarten readers! Can your child read you any labels and signs around your house or around town?  We also became acquainted with non-fiction books, or learn about the world books, and found we could learn so much from the books just by looking at the pictures!

We finished the week by learning a new letter in Fundations...the letter F.  We practiced forming the lowercase letter f, brainstormed words that begin with the /f/ sound, and added a new book to our book boxes...a lot of Friday fun!






As you can see, it was a busy week in Kindergarten!  Thank you to everyone who was able to attend our Open House.  I hope that it gave you a small glimpse into what goes on in our classroom each day.  I look forward to meeting with many of you soon for our Parent Conferences.  Enjoy the weekend!