Well Spring is finally here, even though it doesn’t feel like it! I am hoping that we can soon pack away our snow pants and boots until next year. We have certainly been busy working away in KB and it’s amazing to see all of the progress that each student is making. It has been great to be able to share these accomplishments and successes with you during conferences!
Alex P. was our “Person of the Week” last week. This week Henry was our “Person of the Week”. Both students did a great job sharing their poster and we learned a little bit more about these two friends.
Literacy
We continue to follow the same routine in reader’s workshop with literacy centers. This week in centers was all about the letter ‘W’ (Ww-wind-/w/) and the word wall word “we”. At this point in kindergarten all students have also been placed in a guided reading group that focuses on reading skills and strategies that are just right for their reading level. Guided reading groups have been incorporated into our literacy center time and each group meets with a teacher each week to work on reading strategies that are appropriate for them. It’s been fun to watch them all grow as readers!
Poetry Corner
Pets
We had one fish.
We had one dog.
We had one snake.
We had one frog.
We had one bird.
We had one cat.
But now we have one baby rat!
In writer’s workshop we have begun our new writing unit on “Small Moments”. This unit relates closely to the type of writing that the students have been working on throughout the year, but this unit helps students to write with more focus. Writing “Small Moment” stories has students think of a true story about themselves and “zoom in” to be able to write many interesting details about that one small moment. To help students process this they were introduced to the idea of thinking about small moment stories like a watermelon and the seeds. We learned that a “watermelon story” is one big idea but we can zoom in to find our “seed story”, which is our small moment. The chart you see below is one that we made together as a class and is hanging on our writer’s workshop bulletin board.
Math
Over the past couple of weeks we have transitioned from our “Bunk Beds” unit to our unit on “Apple Boxes”. The skills and strategies that were learned with our “Bunk Beds” unit have helped students work through this new unit. Students were challenged to think about how they could fill empty apple boxes with green and red apples. After having the opportunity to have freely explore how green and red apples could be placed in the apple boxes we began to talk about how we could use a systematic approach to make sure we didn’t miss any ways that the apples could be placed in the box. Through these math conversations we quickly realized that if we place the apples in a certain way we can make a staircase!
Science
This week we started out new science unit on Sand. We began by sharing what we know or what we think we know about sand. Below is what we came up with. We also talked about how scientists make observations and ask questions. Today we observed 5 different kinds of sands and explored the question “Are all grains of sand the same color?” Ask your kindergartner what they noticed…
