Wild About Worms!

We had a great start to our week with our monthly Nearby Nature lesson with Jackson and Christine.  This month we learned about life in the dirt!  There is so much happening below our feet in the dirt and all of those plant roots, earthworms, moles, and millipedes play an important part in our ecosystem. Our focus was on worms and how they act as decomposers, breaking down plant materials and returning them as nutrients to the soil.  The children had the chance to observe worms up close, watch them move, and even hold them!  Then we went outside and examined dirt from two different locations and noticed how they were different and the same.  Be sure to ask your child all about worms!  Thanks to Jackson and Christine for sharing this learning with us!

During Writer's Workshop, we continue to work on our stories and they keep getting better because the children are adding so many details to their pictures.  We focused on other ways to draw people this week and how to draw people in action or motion in a story.  This helps the story come to life and helps the reader to better understand a story.  Can your child draw a person in action?  Running? Kicking?  Dancing?

In Fundations, we learned two more letters this week: C and O.  We continued our Fundations traditions of practicing the sounds, practicing the letter formation, and brainstorming words that begin with that letter's sound.  Can your child tell you a word that starts with the sound /c/ or /o/?  We are really focusing on listening to the first sounds in words and recognizing them.  This is helping to build on onset sound fluency.  Feel free to practice this at home with your child.  You could point to something in your house and ask them to name it and then say the first sound in the word.  This will eventually be put into use when we start developing our reading powers and reading strategies!

In math, we learned about how mathematicians count efficiently by using tally marks.  We practiced building numbers in the tally mark form with popsicle sticks and practiced counting tally marks.  We also learned a new game called Which Bug Will Win.  This is a spinner probability game to see which bug, ladybug or spider, is spun more often.  Ask your child which bug won when we played as a class?

Lastly, we began our first Social Studies theme this week!  For the next month, we will be learning about our community and identifying the many communities to which we all belong.  We were introduced to the concept of community by reading On the Town: a story about a boy who explores his town with his mom.  We learned that a community is a group of people who live, work, or play together.  We brainstormed a list of people, places, and things in our community of Shelburne and then each child made a pocket flap book with a picture of themselves and four places in our community.  Which places did your child draw?




We learned our second sight word this week during Reader's Workshop!  Our new word is "we".  We found this word a lot as we were reading our latest Let's Find Out magazine about sharing with friends.  After reading the magazine together and practicing the shared phrase "We share the..", the children read through their magazine and circled all their sight words: we and the.  Then they practiced reading with a partner and re-reading it again!  We learned this week that readers can learn more from a book if they re-read it. So this week we practiced reading and reading again to find new parts of the picture of find new words we recognize.  We encourage re-reading here in Kindergarten so feel free to have your child "re-read" books again at home, by going through the pictures and telling what is happening more than once.

Have a wonderful weekend!