Halloween Week Announcements

This Wednesday is our…..

Please have your child come to school dressed in their costume Wednesday morning. We will parade around the school for the older kids right away in the morning. After we are done, the children will change into their regular school clothes. Our party will be from 1:45-3:00! Thank you to the parent volunteers who are planning this party!

Classroom Coin Challenge

The Book Fair is hosting a school wide classroom coin challenge! This was a huge success last year as we collected over $1000 in coins which helped put books into the hands of children in our community. Additionally, Scholastic matches our monetary donations with a donation of up to one million books to national non-profit organizations dedicated to helping families in need. We have a collection container in our classroom to collect loose change during the week of the fair.  The classroom in each grade level that collects the most change will receive $25 in free books for their classroom! Please encourage your child to bring their loose change to school to fill our container for a good cause!

Stop by the book fair during conferences and check our all the neat books they have to offer. Lots of great gift ideas!

Important Dates to Remember

November 5th or 8th – Parent Teacher Conferences

November 6th – 50th Day of School Celebration (50’s Day!) Click on the link below to check out all of the fun things we will do!

http://kindergartenwithmissrichardson.blogspot.com/2011/11/50th-day-of-school-celebration1950s.html

November 16th – NO SCHOOL. Professional Development Day.

Math Time

We have finally introduced all of the choices during our Math time!! This is one of my favorite parts of the day. We start by doing a whole group problem on the Smartboard. The kids are allowed to use math manipulatives, draw a picture or use mental math. Once they have the answer, they practice writing their numbers until I can get to them to ask how they solved the problem. It has been so fun to see the different strategies they use to get their answers and the ownership they are taking in their learning. I love it!!

After this we have a short mini-lesson and then we go into our choice time. The four choices include:

Math by Myself

  Students find a spot in the room to work quietly by themselves. They may play games like “Roll and Color”, “4 in a Row”, “Shape Designs”, and “Magic 10 Wand”. All of these choices are building their number sense and helping them recognize number sequences and patterns.

 

Math with Someone

  Students find a partner to work with and they pick a game to play and find a spot in the room to work quietly. They may choose from many games we have practiced in the past two months including “Hundreds Chart”, “Missing Numbers”and “Number Matching.” They love to work with a friend and I love that they are having fun while LEARNING!

Number work

Students may either get a white board with a marker to practice writing their number or get a play-doh mat and play-doh to work on number sense. We will continue to add more choices to Number Work, but for now we need lots of practice writing our numbers the correct way.

 

Math Technology

(No picture for this one yet) We recently received 10 Ipads so we have been LOVING using those for Math Technology.  Right now we are playing a rocket ship game that gives addition and subtraction facts (with pictures). The kids must find the correct answer before time runs out. I love this game because it helps the kids practice their number facts which helps them solve story problems faster and easier!

While the students are busy working, I am able to pull small groups to work on our CGI or story problems. They have been doing an excellent job with this and I am amazed everyday at the strategies they use to solve problems and the explanations they give for solving them. In September we worked on addition story problems. This month we are working on subtraction story problems. Try it at home with them—they will love to show you what they know.

Here are some fun videos we have been watching to help us learn our numbers.

Big Numbers Song

Numbers in the Teens

Seasons

Last week we did lots of fun season projects! We read about the four different seasons and came up with lots of facts about each one. Here is our class poster showing you everything we know!!

After we read The Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons, we made four different trees representing the different seasons. It was fun to use tissue paper to make our trees look real!

        

Since we are in the season of fall, we read a lot of books about leaves and all the different kinds there are and why they fall off the tree during the autumn season. The kids chose to either decorate a maple leaf or an oak leaf. We mixed vinegar and water together and dipped our paint brushes in the mixture to “paint” tissue paper onto our leaves. After they dried we took the tissue paper off and it looked like we had painted them with water color!

 

 

Our last fall project was our scarecrow painting! First, we did a guided drawing with our crayons. The kids had to copy what I did on my paper. Next, we painted our setting (a term we have been talking about A LOT! ) and made it look like a real cornfield. The next day we made the scarecrows out of fun scrapbook paper and made them pop out of our setting! They turned out so cute!

   

This week we are talking about spiders!!! Fun pictures to come!

Happy Fall!

Character Counts Week!

Next week the elementary will be celebrating Character Counts week! Because of this, we will have dress up days. Look at the schedule below to know what your child will need to wear each day!

MONDAY: PAJAMA DAY

TUESDAY: HAT DAY

WEDNESDAY: OPPOSITE/BACKWARD DAY

THURSDAY: PILLAR DAY
       Kindergarten: wear purple

FRIDAY: JERSEY DAY

Writer’s Workshop: Personal Narratives

For the past two weeks we have been studying personal narratives during our writing workshop time.  We have really been working on stories with defined characters and setting as well as including a beginning, middle and end.  Another topic we have covered is making sure our readers know how we feel when they are reading our stories. To help us remember, we all got hearts on our hands to remind us to include the “Heart” of our story, or the most important part to us. 

The illustrations are a major focus for us as we are writing our personal narratives because that is how the reader will know what we want to tell them. Slowly but surely we have started to add letters and words to our stories to help the reader understand. I am amazed at how well they have done adding words/sentences that make sense in their stories!!

Tomorrow we are starting an illustrative study focused on drawing people, animals or other items from different points of view. We have another week left of personal narratives and then we will move onto our next unit! Your child’s stories will be coming home in their Friday Folders this week, so make sure you ask them to read it to you!

Here are some of the stories these smarties have been working on!

Captain Underpants

  

Star Wars

        

Our Pumpkin Week

Last week we did so many fun things with pumpkins and topped off our week with a trip to the pumpkin patch! It was a cool day, but we had so much fun picking our pumpkins, playing in the different play areas, mini golfing and petting the animals we didn’t even notice!

Pumpkin Math

During math we have been practicing putting two numbers together to get another number. This was a perfect game to help us with our number sense and counting. We got into partners and rolled to die. We added those numbers together and colored the number we saw on the pumpkin! This is now one of our  “Math by Myself” choices and everyone loves to play it.

     

Pumpkin Writing

One of our choices during our Daily 5 Language time is “Work on Writing.” If they choose this, I have a “write the room” paper they use to look for words around the room that start with a specific letter. Last week they had to find words that started with the letters in the word pumpkin. This choice allows them to work on their handwriting/fine motor skills as well as recognize different letters and their sounds. It is fun to watch them walk around the room with their clipboards and paper concentrating hard on finding the correct words.

Pumpkin Investigation

Just like our apples, we observed and investigated our class pumpkin. We talked about its size, shape, height and what was inside! We all got to touch the seeds and glue some onto our pumpkin paper. Then we filled in a poster about the feel of seeds, why they are important and how many of us liked how they felt on our fingers. We even counted ALL of our seeds! We counted 548!

       

Pumpkin Patch!!!