A big week of learning!

 This week during theme we have been enjoying learning about each other's holiday traditions! It is fun to see all the similarities and differences we have around the holidays.  On your child's sharing day, he or she has talked about the tradition and shared a photo (if there was one) and then we all illustrated a picture to go with the tradition.  At the end of our Traditions unit, each child will bring home an illustrated book with all of our class' traditions.  This week we learned about Winona's gingerbread house, Arsenie's cookies, Madison's Christimas caroling, Sabine's trip to Mexico, Ray's Christmas in Minnesota, and Hannah's Chanukah menorah!  We are looking forward to learning about more traditions next week!  If you haven't sent me an email about your child's tradition, please do so soon!

This week in Reader's Workshop we started a new unit called "We Are Super Readers". In this unit, the children will be learning strategies for beginning readers.  We are learning we all have reading super powers that will help us to become the best readers we can be.  This week we were introduced to Pointer Power.  All the children were given a special pointer to use to point to each word as they read which helps them match their reading voices to the print on the page.  Developing one-to-one matching is on the early reading behaviors that will help the children move into more conventional reading.  Can your child demonstrate his or her power to you at home? Go Super Readers!

We had a new Scholastic Let's Find Out magazine to read this week.  It was about bears and other animals getting ready for winter and hibernating.  We used our "pointer power" to help us read the magazine and we learned a new sight word: "it". Also during our literacy time, we were introduced to two more letters: h and k.  We practiced forming the letters and brainstormed words that have that letter at its initial sound. We are almost to the end of the alphabet!  When we come back to school in January, we will quickly go through how to form all the uppercase letters as well.

In Math, we continue to study numbers from 1-20, with activities the include matching numerals and quantities, counting forward and backward, ordering numbers,  reading numerals, comparing quantities to determine more or less, and adding.  We were introduced to new game called Bicycle Race that helped us to practice doubling numbers and Grab Bag Five and More that required us to use tally marks to build numbers.

During Writer's Workshop, we moved from just labeling our illustrations in our stories with words to writing a sentence to describe what is happening in the story!  We practiced counting out the number of words in the sentence and then stretching out the words to write down the letters that make those sounds.  I was very impressed with our Kindergarten Writers!  They are working so hard on stretching out words and listening for sounds.  Everyone wrote at least one or two sentences!  Great work!


Lastly, we had some fun reading snow stories this week!  We were inspired by one story about a snowman so we made our own snow people!  They are pretty cute!

Have a wonderful weekend!