BRRR!

What a chilly and snowy week!  Thank you for sending your child with all their winter gear...they stayed warm outside in the snow!  Please note, your child also needs to have a pair of shoes here to wear in the classroom.  Some children are only arriving with their snow boots.  Unfortunately, this gets our carpet snowy and wet after recess.  You are more than welcome to send a pair of shoes in and have your child leave them here for the remainder of the winter season.

In math, we have been learning about and working with different shapes.  So we used some of our math vocabulary and shape knowledge to make some festive turkeys for our entryway.  We cut circles, triangles, and rhombuses to make our turkeys.  They are pretty cute!  We also learned two new Work Places this week: Grab Bag Doubles and Butterfly Race.  In Grab Bag Doubles, we learned about how to double a number and even and odd numbers and in Butterfly Race, we continued to practice identifying numbers and counting dots on a ten-frame.

In Reader's Workshop, we finished our first "We Are Readers" unit.  During this unit the children learned how to partner read and to read "old favorites" by looking at the pictures, remembering how the story goes, and reading and pointing to words they recognized  We celebrated all our accomplishments by reading our stories to Miss Deb's fourth graders.  Our Kindergarten readers did a wonderful job!  Also during Reader's Workshop, we read our latest Let's Find Out Magazine about Veterans.  In our magazine we learned about veterans and why we honor and celebrate them. We also had a new sight word in our magazine: you.  Another word to add to our list!


During Writer's workshop, we learned two more letters: E and R. Next week, we will begin using all of our letter-sound knowledge to start adding labels and words to our pictures in our stories.  I can't wait to see our Kindergarteners start writing on their own!  However, before we can start adding words, we talked about planning how the story goes before we write and then evaluating our work with a rubric.  We talked about wanting to always do our best work and writers often revise their work to make it better. We looked at a Kindergarten rubric for writing and then examined our own work.  Are we drawing people with bodies or still stick figures? Are we carefully coloring and using multiple colors?  Or are we just scribbling and using two colors for the whole page. As children looked at their work and their rubric, they determined if they were doing "four-star" drawing for their stories.  If not, they took the time to go back and revise their stories.  They all did a wonderful job of revising their work!

During theme, we continued to learn more about communities by discussing communities helpers.  We read a book called Career Day and talked about all the important people in our community who help us or our families and neighbors.  The children all created a Community Helper Flip Book.  This book is in their book boxes to practice reading it!  It had another new sight word..."am".

Speaking of sight words, next week I will be sending home a list of Kindergarten sight words and some activities you could do at home with your child to help them practice reading, writing, and spelling these words.  These are optional and just something to do if you want to extend your child's learning at home.  Have a wonderful weekend!