Mrs. LaBlanc's Kinderblog: 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