Week of January 23-27

This week…
We continued our winter theme by starting the week off with the big book The Jacket I Wear in the Snow. This is a rebus story and a fun one to sequence and retell.

Word Study:
• We worked on sorting sight words in different ways such as those with 3 letters or those with 2 letters or words with e’s and words with o’s.
• Students used a cut up version of our morning message to read and piece back together using known words as anchors.
• Students sorted pictures with long and short vowel sounds



Writer’s and Reader’s Workshop:
Again, these were both focused on the reading and writing of small moments/personal narratives. We use what we call mentor texts to listen to how authors write narratives. This week I pulled from several books including The Kissing Hand to show students how an author stretches a simple statement by adding detail. For example in The Kissing Hand there is a passage that goes something like this:
Chester took his mother’s hand in his. He uncurled her fingers and opened them one by one like a fan. Then he gently pressed his lips against her palm and kissed it…” I explained to the children that the author could have just written “Chester kissed his mom’s hand”, but I asked them to think about how they created that picture in their minds from the author’s words.
We also had mechanical mini-lessons reminded students how to stretch out a word to hear and record all the sounds so that readers can better read their pieces. Punctuation was another reminder this week. Some students are beginning to use periods regularly and I noticed a few using exclamation marks as well…what smarties they are!!Look what Claire produced from picturing her story like a movie...I loved when she told me "I pushed my lips together!" When I put this piece on the Elmo projector for all to see...classmates helped Claire decide that she needed to add what happened after the lip part and Claire chose to add "I softly blew". What an awesome piece of writing!
Madelyn's story: "Once there was a really scary dog! It frightened the 2 people because he had blood dripping down his mouth. It was just drool. All he wanted was the chocolate bar."

Wow!! Again, having this piece on the projector all students were able to see this piece and participate in a discussion. When asked "What do you notice about Madelyn's writing that was included in our workshop lessons this week?" The hands flew up quickly commenting on how it was a seed story vs. a watermelon and how she stretched out the moment with interesting parts. I was also delighted to hear students respond with other things they noticed about the piece...When asked "How did Madelyn show that they were frightened?" Two classmates responded "The boy and girl are pushing away from the dog with their arms." and "Look at their teeth!". It amazes me how observant they can be when they are focused.

Page 2 "So then they found out he was really just begging". AGAIN, WOW! Notice how her illustrations completely change and reflect the new mood of the story.

What a reward it is for us as teachers and parents to see this learning taking place so quickly. Keep up the great writing kindergarten!!


Additionally, we read several books with Tacky the penguin, a well-loved character. We listened to that author’s style and how she uses repetition and describing words. This led us into a lesson on descriptive words. We then went back into a snow story from the week and designed snowmen with which we listed with descriptive words.





Math:
We started our week off with a fun game learning attributes such as color, size and shape. Each child was given a shape with similar and different attributes . We compared them, explored the similarities and differences and played “Guess my rule” with them.
While I was absent students got extra practice with our “top-it” and “monster squeeze” games.
We continue to explore measurement and this week focused on length. Students learned how people long ago measured with their feet. It was fun to take a 12 inch foot around the room to practice measuring objects. Next, we learned about rulers and tape measures. I was able to squeeze in a fun "mitten" lesson I had planned last week. Due to the warm weather, not enough children brought mittens. The lesson connected to the story The Mitten and we estimated how many cubes would fit in different mittens.



Work Stations:
At the listening center I again switched up or response to making drawings of the beginning, middle and end of the story. Again, I’m not sure the majority showed best effort. I’m hoping that this coming week will show better drawings with details.

Other stations…reading a hearts book while highlighting the word “on”, clipboarding with things we wear in the snow, playing a game where students find specific letters in words, played a graphing game, wrote about things that are heavy and light, practiced the _an word family with a word wheel and magnetic letters, painted a snowy sky background for snowmen, retelling with puppets from The Mitten story at the puppet theatre and more















Below are photos of some of the finished torn snowmen on our water painted backgrounds. Hope you're enjoying them at home!




Extras:

• A special thanks to Mrs. Kerwin for again supplying our class this week with extra snacks. The children go through a large carton of goldfish every few weeks. Please try to remember to pack a daily snack for your child.

• Mrs. Currie, our art teacher is looking for a parent to volunteer in the art room with our class on Mondays from 1:30-2:30 pm. You can only imagine making art projects with 28 students each week. From experience it can be very tricky. If you’re available Monday afternoons, please let me know. Thanks!

Upcoming Dates:

February 3rd- Spirit Day here at Dublin. Wear your favorite sports team shirt and bring Two Food items to donate to Gleaner’s Food Bank of Oakland County

February 14th- Valentine Party starting at 12:15 pm and ending at 2:20 pm. Details came through folders this week.

February 17th- If we have no snow days before this date we will have an all kindergarten celebration for our 101st day of school. It’s a Dublin tradition similar to the Pow-Wow day, but a 101 Dalmatian Day. I’ll have to check with my colleagues to be sure on this date, but wanted to give you a heads up on it.

February 20th – 24th Winter Break, no school

Week of January 16th-20th

This week…
We enjoyed Jan Brett’s version of the folktale, The Mitten this week. This big book led to wonderful discussions on winter, animals, hibernation and many elements of literature such as cause and effect (not necessarily in those terms), and sequential order.

We also read several winter favorites, such as The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. This is the third Ezra Jack Keats book we’ve read in class. Just the other day Carter brought a book found in our classroom library and said, “Look, this is another Ezra Jack Keats book”. Five year olds can be so amazing! Speaking of Carter…he became a big brother this past week to a baby girl named Riley. Congratulations to his family!


We will touch upon the theme of winter and animals throughout the winter months as we learn about our changing seasons for science (this is emphasized more so in the spring) and non-fiction texts connecting to arctic animals.
Word Study:
• We worked on recognizing high frequency words in context. This is something your child likely does at home or on the road too when s/he shouts out a word s/he knows and can read from a sign, label or book.
• We played sight word Lotto (just like Bingo).
• We also continued our work with short and long vowels.

Writer’s and Reader’s Workshop:
This week both workshops shared the same theme- Personal Narratives.I spent a lot of time reading literature that demonstrated an author taking a small moment in time and turning it into a story/book. We read books such as Night Whispers by Angela Johnson and I reread parts of The Snowy Day to show this as well. Readers noticed things such as how the author uses I or me or my in these types of small moment/personal narratives. Within these books we also practiced making connections and retelling the stories in our own words. Notice these are concepts we repeat often in kindergarten.

In the writing workshops students used their buzz groups to help them first tell their stories and then went to work shortening these to put on paper with details. The big focus used to have students write "small moments"/personal narratives was taking a large (watermelon) idea and pulling out just a small (seed) moment from that story. Another strategy used for teaching small moments was to have children picture experiences in their heads like a movie playing. We found that when we set it up as a movie we could pull in more of our senses such as the smells or sounds in our stories. It took most of the week for students to write a small moment and it was a difficult task for most. We tried to bring in our beginning, middle, end learning from last week to help them stick to writing at least 3 sentences…it’s a work in progress at this time for sure.






Alivia was proud to read this story to us during our workshop sharing time. It's adorable!

"Once upon a time I did work and my name is Alivia. I was the boss of a company and the company was called The Cupcake Factory. And they had donuts too. And then people came in. Then the people did get a donut and then they ran out of donuts."

This was another wonderful story we heard this week by Merrick: "I had a play date with Andy. We played Bayblades And we played video games. And I went home."

Math:
We had our last week of math review. Students were excited to bring home their patterned block template pictures that they created with the templates (stencil like tool we use with shapes). I wish I had remembered to take photos of these pictures, as they were quite creative. Students also practiced our “Top it” game with recognizing numbers and values. All students were given a math assessment and I was very pleased with the progress our class has made thus far. On Friday we started new math learning by introducing time periods. We discussed how time was measured in days, weeks, months etc. on calendars and also with minutes & hours on clocks. We read a couple books on passing time and learned about how our days were broken into morning, afternoon and evening. Students created a one day time line to illustrate the sequence of their day. Below are a few photos of the work that was done.

Work Stations:
At the listening center we switched up or response to making a diagram of the character and telling one thing about him. I notice that many children do not put forth best effort at this station. I thought the diagram would add a fun component. If you had a chance to look at the listening center response sheet and still have it, please comment to your child about the effort in the diagram and sentence.
Other stations…writing a number chart to 40 on dry erase grids, comparing weights with our balance scale, filling in a hundreds grid with number tiles, painting, handwriting and sorting ending sounds at the magnetic station.









This week we were proud to see that more students than ever completed all of their work stations. To celebrate we had a game morning on Friday. Students enjoyed a variety of games such as Candy Land, Toss a rhyme, Letter Factory and more.










Extras:
• A special thanks to Mrs. Kerwin for again supplying our class this week with extra snacks. The children go through a large carton of goldfish every few weeks. Please try to remember to pack a daily snack for your child.
• Mrs. Currie, our art teacher is looking for a parent to volunteer in the art room with our class on Mondays from 1:30-2:30 pm. You can only imagine making art projects with 28 students each week. From experience it can be very tricky. If you’re available Monday afternoons, please let me know. Thanks!

• I apologize that I forgot to send the handwriting prompt sheet along. I will copy it and send it soon. My focus had been on the assessments and ending our quarter. I’ll be happy to be back into our usual routines.

Upcoming Dates:
February 14th- Valentine Party starting at 12:15 pm and ending at 2:20 pm. Details will come through folders this week.
February 17th- If we have no snow days before this date we will have an all kindergarten celebration for our 101st day of school. It’s a Dublin tradition similar to the Pow-Wow day, but a 101 Dalmatian Day. I’ll have to check with my colleagues to be sure on this date, but wanted to give you a heads up on it.
February 20th – 24th Winter Break, no school