Week of January 30th- February 3rd

We had a roller coaster week here in room 306! Many of our classmates were in and out with colds and viruses. We hope everyone is feeling healthier by Monday. Our week started out a bit loud and we had to review our 3 class rules: BE KIND, BE A HARD WORKER and BE SAFE. The “be kind” rule needed the most work this week. There were many, many hurt feelings throughout the week and discussions on solving problems with friends. Though there were challenges socially, the academic performance in both our reader’s and writer’s workshops amazed me.




Much laughter and discussion came from one of our big books this week, The Hat. It is a story written by Jan Brett and is similar to The Mitten. We also took advantage of learning more about Jan Brett as an author and person. We know she wrote several books we’ve enjoyed throughout the year including Gingerbread Baby. I was able to pull up some video clips from the internet so that we could listen and learn more about her. We learned she likes to travel a lot and loves animals. Believe it or not she has pet hedgehogs. We also learned (and perfectly pieced into our writer’s workshop) that she created The Hat story from something that happened with her own pet hedgehog. I have been stressing this to the children how it’s easiest to write about personal experiences and stretch them out.
Your child should also have brought home a hedgehog drawing…we watched a short clip by Jan Brett teaching us how to draw a hedgehog, such fun!






Word Study:
· We combined word study this week with writer’s workshop looking for and adding describing words from books and into our own writing.
· We also continued practice with long and short vowels. Students are getting better at recognizing/matching sounds and vowel letters.

Reader’s Workshop:
· As mentioned above we studied Jan Brett as an author and illustrator.
· We did a lot of compare and contrast this week with books starting with comparing The Hat with The Mitten. A Venn diagram was created with and from the students comments and perspectives. Students also used independent/partner reading time to compare and contrast the books they were reading with each other.
· We also finished up our last Tacky series book and discussed the author and illustrator’s styles. We had an interesting lesson where students tried to guess if a book was illustrated or not by Lynn Munsinger. I love Lynn Munsinger’s style myself. She illustrates mainly fictional animal characters which the children quickly noticed. Many students don’t yet understand “style”, but it is something we introduce and try to demonstrate. We sorted books into piles of Lynn’s and not Lynn’s.
· The Hat led to great discussions on comprehension and understanding of the story. Our class was really split on the main theme of the book. It’s so exciting when I see my students start to get the bigger pictures/themes!
· To add to our winter theme we read and studied Carl Sams’ & Jean Stoick’s Stranger in the Woods and Lady Sapphire. Both books have a theme of families taking care of animals in nature. We again made comparisons between books and I listed things children noticed from our comparisons. Additionally, We tied these stories to our year long learning about trees.

Writer’s Workshop:
· Identifying and adding interesting words including describing words was a focus in our writing this week.
· We had a mini-lesson on how writers go back to past stories to complete them. While abandoning a story is common I also wanted to show students how to pull out a story from a previous day and get back into it to finish.
· We worked on writing stories on winter. While most of our writing topics are self selected by students, I explained to them that there are times in school and at jobs where we have to write to a specific topic. Because we’ve read and talked so much about winter these past few weeks, students had a lot of prior knowledge to get them started. I was pleasantly surprised with most students’ pieces this week.
· We also spent two days learning about how authors fix their writing to make it better. Of course you can just imagine how many kiddos thought their pieces were perfect and needed nothing. Using our projector we were able to look at classmates’ stories on the big screen again and find each pieces’ strengths and weaknesses. We helped Joey take a watermelon story down to a seed idea and we helped Christian with a direction to take his story from two sentences to three. On a side note both Joey’s and Christian’s stories were chosen to share because they had interesting words in them (the focus of a mini-lesson earlier in the week).






Math:
· Measurement continues to be a skill we’re working on. We had a fun time on Monday measuring around our room with our feet from one designated spot to the next. This week we also worked on exact measurements with tape measures. Some students are forgetting to hold the tip of the tape measure to the edge of the object being measured.
· We worked with attribute blocks learning a game with 4 spinners used to identify one shape block. We also reviewed “What’s my rule?” sorting game.
· A hundred chart was reintroduced for two games this week. One was a bingo cover up type activity where we noticed patterns of numbers. The other was a race to 100 using dice and playing chips.














Work Stations:
Building sight words at the magnetic center, writing about winter clothes, playing an adding and recording game, retelling at the listening center with beginning, middle, end (these went better this week), playing a bingo game with ending sounds, playing with letters tiles and building words to match pictures, creating polar bears at the art center, writing our y’s (which was hard for some) and more!










Some extra photos from the week...love Alivia and Sam playing restaurant during free choice time!


Upcoming Dates:
February 13th- All Valentines and Valentine boxes are due to school! Thank you!!!
February 14th- Valentines party starting at 12:15 pm and ending at 2:20 pm. I haven’t had many donations come in yet. Please try to donate $3.00 towards pizza, juice, plates, napkins and pretzels. Thank youJ
February 17th- Our kindergarten 101 Dalmatian day will take place from 9:30 until approximately 11:00am. We will need many parent volunteers that day. Information will be coming next week.