Happy Friday Kindergarten families! This has been a busy but fun and exciting week in Kindergarten. We continued our focus this week with weather connecting it to our seasons. Ask your child if (s)he remembers how the sun plays into our season changes. Do they remember which season has the longer days, or which season has the shorter days? We finished sharing the students’ seasonal photos on our large chart and they are now being displayed in our hallway.
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| Students pictures being displayed in the hallway with the corresponding season |
We were able to continue the focus on weather with our big book One Stormy Night. We enjoyed this book so much we read it three days in a row this week! See if your child can retell you the story by memory. We dug deep into the book looking at rhyming words, “talking marks” (quotation marks), capitals, periods, and the short ‘I’ vowel sound (for example; wind, in, swish, splish).
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| "One Stormy Night" by Joy Cowley |
Word Study:
- Looking at the rhyming words in the book, One Stormy Night, and brainstorming additional rhyming words
- Finding periods, question marks, capitals and “talking marks” with One Stormy Night . We talked about the meaning of each, and how we use them when reading and writing
- Short vowel ‘i’ sound
- Understanding how to pronounce words and write words with the silent ‘e’. For example rake, cake, or plane.
- Continued practicing writing our letters and numbers
Readers Workshop:
Readers continued learning about the non-fiction genre. We looked closely at the text features non-fiction books contain such as; table of contents, glossary, index, types of print, diagrams, maps, close-ups, comparisons, cutaways, and captions. We also discussed and looked at the illustrations of how we often see real photographs in non-fiction books. Students were grouped into groups of two or three and provided a bag of books. The students’ job was to figure out what all of the books in that bag were ‘all about’. After students figured out what their books were all about they searched for text features within those books.
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| Diagram and Type of print |
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| Table of Contents |
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| cutaway |
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| Non-fiction: all about "Birds" | |
Writers Workshop:
This week we have been setting the students up for an independent writing piece that will take place after spring break. Writers looked closely at a type of a non-fiction text known as “all about”. We looked at quality children’s literature (mentor text) showing how books are made up of teaching and giving us information all about one topic. For instance we read a book, Spring that gave us information all about spring. The students each generated their own list of topics they knew ‘all about’. For instance some of the topics students knew all about were school, babies, and cats. After students generated their list of topics we continued by picking one of the topics and writing our own non-fiction piece.
Later in the week Mrs. LaBlanc sang the book Bear Facts to the students and talked about how the illustrations portrayed the book to look fiction, but was really a non-fiction book. Students then wrote facts about bears from what we learned inside of the book. For example they may have written, “Bears hibernate in the winter. Bears eat nuts, fish, and honey. ” The students did really well sticking to facts and not adding in any opinions.
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| List of "all about" topics |
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| All about mentor-text's |
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| Working hard on our all about piece |
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| Stretching the words out |
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| Mrs. LaBlanc singing us the "Bear Fact" book |
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| Writing facts about bears |
Math:
Our mathematicians continued working with money reviewing and learning new concepts. By now students should be able to recognize each coin and the value of that coin. Students aren’t expected to know how to count mixed change, but we have been introducing simple mixes (one dime and two pennies, or one nickel and one penny, etc.). Understanding how to add the value of mixed coins is a more difficult concept for the majority of students! This is something you can keep practicing at home with your child. Pull out some change and have them sort and count by ones, fives, and tens. Students are not expected to know how to count quarters, we have just started practicing the rhythm of 25,50, 75,a dollar. See if your son/daughter can teach you the rhythm and/or the money song. Lastly, we have been doing a lot of assessments in math this week. It was thrilling to see the advances students have made. Thanks for all you do to support learning from home!
We finished our week with a fun activity of making our April calendar. This will be the last calendar made this year due to no more availability to construction paper. Dublin isn’t ordering any more construction paper, so projects will be far and in between.
Work Stations:
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| Hard work at writing |
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| Practicing our "I" and "i" |
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| Working with the short "i" vowel |
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| Connecting our seasons with a visual image |
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| Drawing pictures to match the seasons |
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| Making clouds with paint |
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| Money, money, money, MONEY!!! |
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| Finding words with the short vowel "i" sound |
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| Mrs. LaBlanc recorded a story onto the ipod for students to listen to during listening center. |
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| Pocket chart: sorting pictures under the right seasons |
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| Magnetic center: making words with -ing |
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| Students had to roll a die with pictures of coins on each side and graph the correct coin |
A big thank goes out to all of our mystery readers we had this week. Thank you to Kathryn's mom (Mrs. Rogers-1st grade), Payton's mom, Andy's aunt, Amelia's dad, and Filip's mom and sister!
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| Kathryn's mom reading "Knuffle Bunny" |
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| Amelia's dad reading "One" |
- To finish our week of mystery readers for March's reading month we had an author visit from Sam's mom (Colleen Fisher). She talked to us about how she became an author and illustrator and read us one of her books called, "The One and Only Bernadette P. McMullen".
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| Say hello to Bernadette! |
We finished our week with a character parade in the hallways of Dublin. There were all sorts of wonderful and creative book characters. Can you guess the story book they are from?
I wanted to give a big thanks to Mrs. LaBlanc and all of the families of room 306 for making the transition into Kindergarten so welcoming. I have enjoyed, and loved every second I’ve been there. This is my first time writing the blog so I hope I included everything you were hoping for. Please feel free to e-mail me with any questions at mosso1dr@yahoo.com
I hope everyone has a wonderful spring break, and safe travels if they are going anywhere. See you back on Monday, April 9th.
Save the date: Friday, April 20th we are planning on taking a field trip to Domino Farms.
