Week of October 24th-28

I hope all families are enjoying the weekend. Hopefully you're having better weather home than we're having in Traverse City (cold and rainy).

We hit our 38th day of school Friday. The progress I’m seeing is steady and strong!

I heard some fun news this week about one of our classmates, Sam. His photo is entered in a contest to be on the cover of Metro Parent magazine! If you would like to help get him there, please follow this link to vote for him. Thanks

http://www.metroparent.com/Metro-Parent/Contests/Metro-Parents-CoverKids-Readers-Choice-Contest/

Our class enjoyed reading/singing several Halloween books and songs. I can guess that you’ve heard our Counting Creatures song with the chorus “Once upon a time one Halloween night I opened up the door, and oh what a sight”. We also continue to learn new movement songs such as “Cross Over” or the “Cowboy dance” with Jack Hartman’s CD/DVD. The movements demonstrated in these songs help build our brains and bodies

Our work stations gave us much practice on skills including: patterning with Halloween stamps, practicing making h’s and looking for words beginning with the h sound, finding h words on clipboards, playing a Halloween phonics bingo game, matching Halloween words to pictures by looking at the beginning letter sound, writing a Halloween poem, sequencing 5 pumpkins on a gate from big to small (to go along with our “Five Little Pumpkins” song/text), making a paper strip pumpkin, matching upper case to lower case letters and more!
This week I noticed that with parents help (and our voice count downs) students used quieter voices and it seemed to be a calmer work environment. From this came better quality of work. Please take time as work comes home to review it with your child. Ask how it was done. Ask if s/he feels it’s his/her best work! As a staff this week we met and discussed the value of hard work and effort from students and the results it has on LONGTERM student success.













Guided Reading Groups took place while students participated in work stations. Thank you to the many moms volunteering during work stations so that I can pull groups without many interruptions. At this time I am meeting 3 reading groups each day which should meet your child twice a week. As we build stamina for work stations we will stretch the time period to fit in more groups each day. I express to my students that “reading group time is the most important part of my day”. I was delighted to hear from several students that it is also their favorite! Please remember to listen to your child read his/her book 2-3 times and return it daily in its’ bag.

Reader’s Workshop: This week’s lessons focused on reading strategies. We examined the first three, most used strategies kindergarten students use. Children practiced using these throughout the week during our morning message (an interactive writing to start our day), big book reading, and during independent reading. Below is a chart we built as I introduced each strategy and a photo of the prompt cards I use during guided reading. Additionally, you’ll see photos of students with their book bins during independent reading. I love the little nooks they seem to find in our room.

Writer’s Workshop: We started our week discussing what writer’s look like when they’re writing (on task, quiet voices, thinking). We worked on spacing one day using our spacemen markers. This is a skill we will review again and again throughout the year. We also worked on describing a sentence as a complete thought or idea. I introduced a more formal share time where students were able to sit in the “Author’s Chair” to read his/her piece of writing. We will work towards doing this more often, but at this time it’s hard to get our class to work at similar paces. Therefore, we stop several times as we end our writing session to share from our seats or the front of our room. Finally, the challenge lesson of the week was learning to stretch our stories across pages. Students attempted to write a 3 page story and were rewarded with getting to use small table staplers to staple the pages into a book!

Math: We continue to work on teen numbers and practicing writing numbers with correct formation. Many students are still struggling to start numbers (and letters too) top to bottom and left to right. Each morning students participate in answering a question by filling in a graph. Amelia’s big sister has been helping us with this daily graph. Throughout the year we will try graphing independently as we did with the pumpkin count/graph paper that should have come home. We practiced patterning with various items as seen in photos. We extended this pattern lesson by naming our patterns with letters. For example with cubes one might have shown me red, red, blue, red, red, blue, red, red…and we named it AABAAB. We measured ourselves with a measuring tape and then measured with friends to see if we were taller or shorter than each other. We hope you like our calendars each month. This helps us practice writing our numbers as well as learning the pattern of numbers.

It thrilled me this week and last to find that SO many children are choosing to spend time at our writing center during their free choice time. It is proof that learning can be and is FUN!!

Thanks to each of you for helping Claire’s mom prepare for our Halloween party. Each child should bring his/her costume in a bag, as we WILL NOT be wearing our costumes until after 2pm. Our parade will begin at 2:30pm. Parents who wish to help their children dress should arrive at approximately 2:10 PM.

Guided reading groups began today

Good afternoon,
I'm happy to report that we started our reading groups today. You're child is bringing home a book in a bag that s/he is excited to share with you today. Please be sure to return the book & bag tomorrow. The best tip I can give you is praise, praise, praise! If your child forgets a word or two simply go back and reread it after the first time through and prompt them with "let's look at that word", "what sound should we be getting our mouths ready for?". I'm sending home prompts that we will be using in class to keep at home. You'll want to keep these handy until you're more comfortable with prompting on your own.

I usually have a letter I send with the book explaining, but I couldn't locate it today. I believe it's on my home computer, so I'll try to send it tomorrow.
Have fun reading this evening!

Week of October 17-21

We're enjoying the season of fall and the many Halloween activities we're squeezing in. We hope you enjoy some of our projects displayed in "The Pumpkin Patch" outside our door.

Math skills covered this week:

*Tricky teens- played games with teen numbers scattered over floor to find when called out...passed out teens and assigned "Simon Says" type directions to students with a particular number...introduced concept that explains a teen number as 10 + ___ more. For example 18 is really 10+ 8 more. Below you'll see a photo of partners practicing this idea.

*Using number lines & number charts to complete a number fill-in grid.

*Estimation introduction-Main concept was that it's easier to estimate larger items and/or fewer items. It's not easy for us to estimate how many candy corns in our treat jar.Writer's Workshop mini lessons

*Pattern introduction

Writer's Workshop mini lessons:
*Writer's keep ideas and work organized. For this lesson students were given their writer's folders which we call our Writer's Notebook. We keep all work presently in this folder. As the year progresses and we switch writing units these will come home.
*"When I'm done, I've just begun". This will be our slogan during each workshop. As children finish a writing piece they have 3 choices...draw more details, write more words or start a new piece. I explain our Writer's workshop as it compares to soccer practice or dance class. During soccer you only practice soccer skills and so forth.
*Writer's use tools. The photo below shows a sound phone we use to speak a word and hear its' sounds more distinctly. There is a spaceman (wooden clothespin dressed in space suit) used to help us leave spaces between our words. We also use date stamps, staplers, alphabet charts, vowel helping hands and more.

Over the past 5 weeks we have been reading many titles by Kevin Henkes. We have compared and contrasted these books along the way. We discovered that Kevin Henkes wrote many of his books with mice as characters and some characters are in several of his books. We noticed that his books without mice sound very different and are shorter stories. We also noticed that in these books without mice the characters don't talk with one another. Finally, we learned a bit about the author personally. He grew up in Wisconsin and had written/illustrated most of his life. We were somewhat surprised to read that he writes his stories before illustrating. In kindergarten it is more likely that we draw our story and then write the words. Drawing helps us get our ideas and details.

Reader's Workshop: Our mini-lessons were

*Reader's understand that there are different types of books. We made a list that included, story books, informational books, poetry books, concept books (such as shapes or colors) and more.

*Reader's use words they remember from stories to help them reread. We practiced this with several books including our big book, "Dan Goes Home".

*Reader's take care of books and put them away properly. The photo below shows Kaitlyn and Kathryn holding the a basket they had just organized to return to our library.

Below you'll see students at work during work stations. Thanks to all the moms who came to help this week. Students are keeping on task for the most part, but need reminders to use quiet voices. Beginning next week during work stations I will be working with with small groups with guided reading.

Friday we celebrated a Dublin kindergarten tradition by planting a Maple tree on the school grounds.
Earlier this week we read about trees, built puzzles of different types of trees and took time to go meet "Mr. Maple" before he was planted.
As we planted "Mr. Maple" on Friday we sang songs and took part in shoveling the dirt & watering the tree. A big thanks to Mr. Gilmore, our custodian for doing the heavy duty work for us.

Thank you all for the donations for our Halloween party. We look forward to seeing everyone there on the 31st. Just a warning it will be crowded in our classroom!

Upcoming Dates:

*October 31st- Halloween Party 2:30 pm parade begins

*November 8th- Teacher Professional Development day, no school

*November 17th - No school, parent/teacher conferences

Wednesday mornings 8:50 AM- bagel day, $1 (you'll want to arrive on time)

Fridays- popcorn day 50 cents