I think it’s finally safe to say that spring is finally here! Today was one of the very first few days when no one came to me during recess to tell me how cold they were and to ask how much longer we were going to be outside for. It was a great day!
“Person of the Week”:
Tulsi and Nicole!
Literacy:
Over the past 2 weeks we have introduced the letters Z (Zz-zebra-/z/) and Qu (Qu-queen-/qu/). When learning about the letter Q we learned that Q and U are the best of friends and in any word where there is a Q there will ALWAYS be a U! To help us better understand this we learned a pretty silly poem by Dr. Seuss called “Quack! Quack!”
Quack! Quack!
We have two ducks.
One blue. One black.
And when the blue duck goes “Quack! Quack!”
The black duck quickly “Quack-Quacks” back!
The quacks Blue quacks make her quite a quacker,
But Black is a quicker quacker-backer.
We sure how a lot of fun with that poem this week!
This week in Reader’s Workshop students have also been working more with word wall words and practicing using them in sentences and building them with magnetic letters. Our newest word wall words are “at”, “and”, “this”, and “said”.
Home/School Connection: Pick a word wall word from the list on the our classroom website and try to come up with a silly sentence! You can also practice writing with your child by helping them write the sentence on a piece of paper.
Students continue to write small moment stories during Writer’s Workshop. They have really grasped the idea of writing a seed story versus a watermelon story and continue to practice picturing their small moment like a movie in their head in order to write as many details as they can. Shortly after vacation we will begin our big end of the year publishing project!
Science:
Our sand unit is well underway! The KB scientists have been working hard to make a variety of observations about sand. So far we have answered the questions, “Are all grains of sand the same size?”, “Are all grains of sand the same color?”, “What does the sand feel like?”, and “What happens when you mix sand and water?”. Here are some questions to ask your kindergartner about sand:
-How are the grains of fine sand different from the grains of course sand?
-How does sand move?
-How is sand made?
Math:
With the completion of our Bunk Beds and Apple Boxes unit we are now building new skills and strategies on top of those that we have previously learned. This week we did some work with numbers in the tricky teens by showing them on a ten frame (a rectangle with 10 boxes). Students are working on building the understanding that when building numbers in the tricky teens you don’t always have to remove all of the cubes from the ten frames, but rather if you started with 12 and you spun a 14 you can easily make that new number just by adding 2 more cubes. This game reinforces counting in the tricky teens and also encourages students to think about if cubes have to be added or taken away to make whatever number they spun on the playing board.
