Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!
This past week we celebrated Dr. Seuss’ birthday in a variety of ways. On Monday we were lucky to have Mr. King (Fine Arts Coordinator for Newton) visit our class as a guest reader. He shared Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hatches the Egg and introduced us to a new word: faithful. We learned that “faithful” means to keep a promise. After reading Horton Hatches the Egg we discussed how Horton was faithful throughout the story. The students made many great connections!
We also made “Cat in the Hat” hats in celebration of Dr. Seuss. I learned that it is a huge undertaking to try to get 22 kindergartners to look at the camera at the same time! 🙂
Person of the Week:
Tommy was “Person of the Week” this week. Everyone especially loved his picture of Fenway Park and were eager to share their own experiences and adventures of seeing the Red Sox “for real life” (in the words of kindergartners)!
Poetry Corner:
Jelly Beans
Jelly beans are fun to eat.
Share them with the friends you meet.
Eat a few, they sure are yummy.
But not too many-
They will hurt your tummy!
This poem highlighted our newest letter, J, as well as rhyming words. We have been working on deepening our understanding of what rhyming words are as well as generating lists of words that rhyme.
Literacy:
Students were introduced to a new letter, Jj-jug-/j/ and were excited to learn that we only have 6 more letters to learn before we will have learned the entire alphabet! This week we also learned a new word for our word wall- “at”. We learned that this word can be used in sentences (I am at school.) but “-at” is also a word family. Just by changing the first letter before “-at” we can generate many new words (cat, hat, bat, fat, ect.).
In writer’s workshop we continue to add details to our words for our readers. The students have been working hard and this hard work will certainly pay off when we get ready to start our “Small Moments” writing unit in the next few weeks.
Math:
This week we learned about how we know if we have found all of the combinations for a certain number. We agreed that at this point we are all really good at making combinations and writing number sentences to match our combinations, but that it’s more difficult to figure out how we know if we have found all of the combinations. Together we explored the strategy of starting out by placing all of the kids (cubes) on the top bunk and 1 by 1 moving one down to the bottom bunk. After a few days of talking about this strategy and giving students multiple opportunities to explore the strategy independently students are certainly deepening their understanding of how numbers and combinations work!
