Kindergarten with Mrs Munden: 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!