October 21-25

Math:

We've gone crazy with the number 4! Last week the students brainstormed all the ways THEY could show "four." I say THEY because I did not help!! The students came up with the different ways to represent four, and when someone didn't quite show it correctly the students were the ones to pipe up and say, TRY AGAIN!! I am so proud of them and the number sense that they are developing. Another thing we really try to hit on in kindergarten is decomposing numbers. This means to break a number apart into different ways. For example, this week we broke apart the number 4 into five ways: 1+3, 3+1, 0+4, 4+0 and 2+2. We practice this many times throughout the week in our journals, worksheets and bell ringers.

Language Arts:

Our letter last week was Rr for Randy the Rooster! Along with practicing the sound for letter Rr and thinking of words that begin with his letter, we also learned about the word family "-at." We practiced putting different beginning sounds in front of -at to make new words. After we got good at that, we sorted words in the -at, -an and -ad family to help us differentiate between the ending sounds. Being able to recognize and read word family words in an important skill for your young reader. It helps them identify patterns in words and helps them decode other words they may not know. 

We have introduced 4 of our 5 Daily 5 choices! The students are now keeping busy reading to themselves, working with words (rainbow writing sight words, stamping letters/words, assembling alphabet puzzles, etc.) working on writing (writing words around the room) and listening to reading (listening to book on the Ipads). They love this time and usually get to two choices a day!

Writer's Workshop:

We finished our unit on personal narratives! We celebrated Friday by sharing our favorite story we wrote with the class. I am excited to show them to you at conferences! This week will start working on a mini-unit of non-fiction writing. We will learn about the parts of a non-fiction book and what details they have. Since we are studying owls, our non-fiction book will be about owls.

Discovery:

We started studying owls last week! We will continue working on them this week and digging deeper into the different types of owls and the differences between them. This week we had fun doing an owl guided drawing and painting them in. We also filled in a chart about what we know about owls and what we can learn about them. It was a fun week!

Important Dates to Remember:

Thursday, October 31: Halloween parade and party!

Tuesday, November 5: 50th Day of School Celebration (we dress up in 50's attire and do special activities in the classroom. )

October 14-18

Math:

We worked on three special ways to sort things. We learned we can sort objects by shape, color and size. We started by using shape pieces and sorting them all 3 ways. Then we brainstormed ways to sort ourselves! We sorted ourselves by what eye color we had as well as our hair color. It was fun to compare ourselves. It was also a great way to talk about our differences and that each of us is special.

Language Arts:

Henry the Horse was our letter friend last week. We made a list of all the words we could think of that start with letter H. We are practicing saying the beginning sound in words to help us think about what the word could say. We also worked a lot on sounding out words that end in -ad and -an. We are starting to learn that we can put letter sounds together to make words! They are doing an excellent job.

Writer's Workshop:

This will be our last week working on our personal narrative stories. Last week we learned about speech bubbles. Speech bubbles go above our characters and have the words our character is saying in them. We are working very hard to add words to our stories by stretching out the sounds that we hear.

Discovery:

Spiders was our theme last week and it was so much fun! Spiders have two body parts, eight legs and up to eight eyes. We sang a song about the body parts to help us remember. We made our own spiders and our own webs! At the end of the week we came up with a lot of facts about spiders!

Pumpkins and Fire Safety

Math:

We just finished our Unit 2 Assessment! We worked on different ways to make the number 2 and 3, continued to count a set of objects and write the corresponding number and answer story problems asking us which one "has more." This week we are learning the different ways to sort things. Today we explored with pattern blocks and found out we can sort them in 3 ways: by shape, color and size!

Language Arts:

Last week was our first week introducing heart words and word families! Each week from now on the students will have 4 heart words they will work on memorizing as well as a word family. Last week our heart words were: the, I, a, big. The goal with heart words is to be able to read and write them by MEMORY!!! I will be sending home flashcards soon to practice these at home! The more heart words your child knows, the more words they will know as they begin to start reading books. Word families are a group of letters that can be read together. Last week our word family was: -ad. We practiced putting different letters in front of -ad to make words! Ask your child to write words in the -ad family! This week we are working on the -an family. Again, being able to write and read these words and recognize them in reading is the goal!

Writing:

We continue to learn about personal narratives and how to make the come alive! A good personal narrative includes a cover, three important parts to the story and words to go with it. Some of them have finished and are working on new books and some are still working hard to make their first one great! The goal for each student is to write a book about something that has happened in their life that they remember. It has been so fun to read these books and see what is important to them!!

            

Discovery:

Two weeks ago we learned all about pumpkins! We studied a pumpkins life cycle, read a pumpkin poem, made our own scary pumpkins and did a pumpkin investigation! We finished our unit off by visiting the pumpkin patch--which we loved!!!!

     

  

 



Last week was fire safety week. We learned about firefighters and their jobs, safety rules and the parts of a fire truck. We also got to visit the Spirit Lake Fire Department. It was great to see where they work and what they do.