Winter is certainly on it’s way! The first snow fall of the season could not have been more exciting for the students. They could NOT wait to get outside for recess! I know they are hoping for many more snowy days…I’m not sure I share their same sentiment!
With the weather getting colder (and snowier) please be sure to start sending hats, gloves, mittens, and boots to school with your child because we do go out for recess every day. Thank you!
Reader’s Workshop:
This week in reader’s workshop students were introduced to our new letter, Nn and picture card that will help us to remember the sound that N makes (N-nut-/n/). During centers this week students have been working on building letter and sound recognition surrounding the letter N, but also reviewing and working with the other letters that we have learned so far in Fundations.
We have added a new word wall word to our word wall this week- “the”. Encourage your kindergartener to be word detectives and find the word “the” in books, magazines, signs, and even on cereal boxes.
Poetry Corner:
Gentle Falling Leaves
Little leaves fall gently down.
Red and yellow, orange and brown.
Whirling, whirling around and around,
Quietly without a sound.
Writer’s Workshop:
This week in writer’s workshop students were introduced to a new writing strategy- stretching out words in order to write as many sounds as we can hear. For example if a student has drawn a “sun” in their picture, students are now being encouraged to say break the word apart to see how many sounds they can hear beyond just the first sound, like we have been working on.
Recently in writer’s workshop we also began talking about what writers in KB do. We generated a list together about what we do are doing as writers and this is what we came up with:
-We take our time.
-We think about a story that we would like to write.
-We add details about who we were with.
-We add details about what we saw to help our readers know what we were doing.
-We label objects in our pictures.
Social Studies:
This week’s presidential election brought up some interesting conversations in KB. At the beginning of the week we talked about what the president is and what his job is. In a very kindergarten friendly manner we talked about voting and how the president is elected. Towards the end of the week we re-addressed the election and talked about how Obama would be our president for the next four years. We also talked about that the president lives in the White House, which is an American symbol. After viewing a picture of the White House a student raised his hand and said, “Oh my, it’s like a hotel!” Everyone agreed! 🙂
Math:
Over the past week we have been learning about familiar 2 dimensional shapes in more depth. Students are very comfortable with recognizing rectangles, squares, circles, and triangles so the focus for these lessons involved more discussion about how we could describe these shapes. We learned that squares and rectangles both have 4 sides and 4 corners, but squares have sides that are all the same length and rectangles have 2 sides that are longer and 2 sides that are shorter. We also learned that circles have “curved” sides and triangles have 3 sides and 3 corners. Students had the opportunity to see if they could find these shapes around our classroom and I encouraged them to go home to see of they could find these shapes at home as well.
Science:
This week we began to discuss what scientists do and we quickly realized that we are scientists! Both groups had the opportunity to get together with all of the kindergartners in the other 2 classes for an afternoon of science related activities based on the signs of fall that we have been collecting. Students had the opportunity to make observational drawings, create leaf rubbings, and to observe signs of fall using ProScopes: a tool that scientist use to observe objects up close.
