Weeks of Nov.14-23

Happy Thanksgiving to each of my students and their families. I am so very thankful to have the opportunity to spend my week days with my wonderful kindergarten sweeties. I hope all of you have quality time over this long weekend to enjoy your families.

I am also thankful for the many volunteers I have each week in and out of my classroom! The Pow-wow was a complete success thanks to time spent in and out of school by parent volunteers. It was nice to hear from many parents how much they enjoyed this Dublin tradition and we were all glad to continue it.

This slideshow is sure to bring a smile to many faces. Hope you are able to share it with family and friends tomorrow for Thanksgiving.

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It's hard to believe that the holidays are just around the corner...we will have just 3 weeks of school before the break. On Tuesday I will return to reading groups sending home books for students to practice reading. At this time children should be rereading this book 3 times. As the books become more difficult (and lengthy) once or twice will do. The time spent last week re-evaluating readers led me to change many ability-like groups already. Your readers are starting to bloom!

I appreciated having the time (though it was short) to share with you your child's progress. Please know that your child's report card for the next 3 quarters will be available on-line only. You'll use "Family Access" to view it. Also, know that at any time you have questions or concerns we can meet or talk by phone. I am available most days before or after school.

Much of our 3 day week was spent working on Thanksgiving learning, activities and projects. You can only imagine how many times we sang "Turkey Tango", LOL!


With the preparation for conferences (including assessing students individually) I lost focus with my camera that week. Sorry I do not have photos for most work stations nor workshops from this week and last.

Reader's Workshop: Since adding our partner reading component to our work time we've checked back with partners to see if they are following our shared expectations such as keeping the book in the middle and taking turns. We had a few fun lessons with this idea by looking at photos taken of us during partner time and critiquing them on the TV screen as a class.

In addition the themes of this past week or so have been...

*"Reader's get started with reading right away so not to lose reading time" and "Reader's read the whole time during independent reading and even reread books if they still have time"

*"Reader's look closely at the pictures to help them get ready to read a new book". This has been taught in each reading group as well. We call this a "picture walk".

*"Reader's can reread books by remembering what happened in the story"

Writer's Workshop: We are learning ways to help us choose topics to write about. Students now have "Writing idea picture lists" in their writer's notebook. We also reviewed many past books we've read with patterns and learned that we can borrow the patterned sentence to write our own pattern books. Some students used "I see a ___." One students made a family book where the pattern was simply family labels (mom, dad, brother etc.)

Math: Below are a few of the math lessons from the past week and a half

* We used our number sense to solve problems with marbles in and out of our pockets. For example I put 5 marbles in my pocket, pulled 2 out and students had to figure out how many were left in the pocket. Photo below shows Gavin giving us a marble pocket problem to solve.
*We are using our fingers to add numbers.

*We are practicing telling numbers before & after other numbers..."What comes before 13?" Ask your child a few of these for practice. The befores seemed more difficult than the afters.

*Monster Squeeze was a hit. Students have to guess a number I'm thinking of and we use monster puppet sticks to show smaller than/larger than visuals.

Work Stations:

restaurant menus at the writing center, cut/glue capital & lowercase letters to match beginning sounds , labeling farm animal parts with dry erase markers, leaf paintings, "Turkeys" book at the browsing box highlighting the word "by", sorting syllables at the magnet center, and more

Upcoming Events:

Nov. 28: NO school

Dec. 3: Dublin holiday craft show

Dec.3-9 Dublin Book Fair (will be open during holiday craft show on Saturday)

Dec. 16: Holiday Party (to be planned) and last day before holiday break

Hello,
Just a couple of quick items...
* Conferences are tomorrow. I look forward to sharing your child's progress.

*I did not meet with most reading groups this week. Instead I met individually with students to monitor progress and check reading levels. Reading groups will not likely meet until after the Thanksgiving break. Next week we'll be working on Pow-wow/thanksgiving items.

*I am leaving tomorrow evening after conferences to go to Toronto for the weekend. I have taken a personal day, as we have an event there Friday morning. I let the children know this and explained that I will leave detailed plans so that their day goes as planned.

*There will be no blog update this weekend. Instead I will combine this week's and the next.

*If you haven't made your tunic yet, I'm leaving a sample on the table outside my door tomorrow.

*There will also be a volunteer sign up for the Pow-wow tomorrow on the table.

Week of November 7-11

We're happy to have a new classmate in our room. The children have kindly welcomed Zandra as a classmate and new friend.

We're so thankful for the great response we received regarding Dublin's Kindergarten Pow-wow. We had plenty of parents offer help in recreating many of our games/activities. Thanks too for the donation offers. I will send a note to those of you who offered to confirm items next week. We're completely covered for the food donations, thank you!
Please take time this coming week to create your child's tunic. This is sure to be a grand experience for all.

Work stations: Retelling puppets and wheels for Mrs. Wishy Washy, finding t's to record on clipboards, practicing t's with handwriting (starting at top line), sorting magnetic letters by short and tall letters (something we've been working on...l,t,h,k,b,d are examples of tall lowercase letters while a,c,e and v are short), browsing book- "On the farm", writing a November word book (from our Nov. chart) using a sentence pattern, making Mrs. Wishy Washy with a paper roll, making a turkey (which is hanging in the hall), counting how many cubes we could grab and graphing that number, counting Mrs. Wishy Washy's bubbles by tens (premade mats with number tiles by 10's)...and more!

We continued our farm theme from Mrs. Wishy Washy with other farm related big books. We sang "Old MacDonald had a farm" and then changed the words of this song to use "AEIOU". We sang about the short vowel sounds using the lamb, pig, hen, duck and dog...the lamb had an "a-a here and an a-a there". Students enjoyed learning to draw farm animals with some step by step directions.

Writer's Workshop: We had several important lessons about how authors keep writing projects going, how they may put some aside at times and how long it may take them to finish. In one mini-lesson we looked at 3 different books and predicted how long each book might take to complete. This guided our thinking towards our own writing. Students are learning to pull out previous writing pieces from their writer's notebook to continue working on them.






Reader's Workshop: Our focus this week was learning about reading partnerships. We had great conversation about how partners look, sound and act. The ideas discussed were put onto a chart (any charts we make are always revisited when time allows during our workshop time). Students were paired up with students of similar abilities and partner reading will now be a part of our workshop format within each workshop time. On our first day in partnerships I scanned the room with my camera looking for actions (rules) of partnerships we had just discussed. To end this first lesson I displayed partner photos on our TV screen (from my camera) and students examined each for strengths and areas for improvement. I was delightfully surprised with what students noticed.

Math: This week we took some time to review skills with various activities. We worked with patterns including using shape pattern blocks. The shape templates have become a favorite. I'm sure you found one or more shape designs in your child's folder this week. Ask your child how we remember the shape "trapezoid". I modeled using a robotic voice and could here it repeated throughout the week...I'll use any gimmicks to catch their attention, LOL. We also used links to pattern and count matching teen numbers. We also had an introductory lesson on symmetry. Students explored our room and even had a nature walk finding symmetrical items. Finally, we worked with measurement sequencing short to tall around the room.

We had our first sighting of hats & mittens on Friday. Many of you may not know that each morning your child hangs his/her coat on our coat rack which is packed tight housing 28 coats. This rack then gets brought down to lunch with us where students dress for recess. On Friday I taught children a song about putting our gloves in our hat and our hat in our sleeve. Please help your child practice this at home. Also, don't forget to put names on every article of clothing.

Upcoming Events:

Nov. 14-PICTURE RE-TAKE DAY
Nov. 17th: NO SCHOOL, parent/teacher conferences
Nov.23: Pajama Day to kick off pajama drive we hold for families in need
Nov. 23:Kindergarten Pow-wow (9:30 am)
Dec. 3: Dublin holiday craft show
Dec.3-9- Dublin Book Fair (will be open during holiday craft show)

Re-posting Halloween and Reading buddy slideshows

I've just noticed that the Smilebox icons were not in proper form on my last week's post. Hope it's easier to view now. They're great photos!

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Math assessments coming home

This week I am assessing students both in group settings and individually with math skills. As you may remember from blogs we've worked a lot with learning to read and write numbers, making patterns, counting, shapes and sorting. Yesterday I met with small groups to have them write numbers in sequence independently. They were not able to use charts or number lines. As I've explained many times to my students, we all bloom at different times. Each kindergarten student is working hard and it is common that s/he be at his/her own pace or level at this time in the year. Our report card standards are viewed as a standard, but may take many children until the end of the year to master. Below are some samples of the number assessment. On the report card we use symbols B,D &S to represent beginning, developing and secure. At this time my hope is to see children starting to grasp the idea of number patterns. They've been learning the rows of our 100's chart by calling them ones, teens, twenties, thirtees etc. If students are getting most of the teen numbers and understanding some of the 20's or 30's they are developing at grade level expectation for this time of year.

Also, I worked individually with students to assess shapes. Some children are still confusing rectangle, square and sometimes triangle.

These papers will be sent home for you to view (and work on if needed over the next few weeks).