Mrs. LaBlanc's Kinderblog: Week of May 14-18

Our kindergartners are in full bloom for the third week of May! I was delighted to work with students Wednesday and Thursday for individual assessments. All students have shown such progress and achievement throughout the year. It is truly a rewarding time of year having the chance to reflect on each student.

We enjoyed the big book called Rosie's Walk. It's a wonderful story that tells most of the story through pictures. After reading the book several times, students illustrated a personal copy. Hopefully your child has read it to you already.

Writers Workshop: This week we were able to finish illustrations on our published poem. A copy of our class poetry book was put in each folder on Friday. I hope you enjoy reading these as much as we did. It was a fun writing unit that allowed for lots of creativity. We also reviewed the other types of writing we have done this year such as patterned text books, non-fiction, labeling pictures etc. Students were given the opportunity to write using any form this week. Beginning next week we will start our research unit of study...yes, research in kindergarten! It's actually a lot of fun and scaffolded by myself and Mrs. Noel.

Reader's Workshop: Reader's learned how to return to their texts to answer questions or confirm thoughts about the texts they are reading. They also learned to use the text to share parts of the book with their partners. We also continued to practice all reading strategies throughout each workshop this week.

Math: Students learned about halves and even numbers. Of course this is an introduction, but many students seemed to understand the concept. We used bingo chips and divided them with odd and even numbers of chips to discover which numbers could be divided into even halves. We also reviewed more with measurement and number stories. Next week I will send home the number stories books when they are completed. The children are becoming more confident with these each time we work with them.

We also started a map unit this week. Students are referencing themselves on a map. They're working to recognize their city, state, country and continent. We looked at many practical uses for a map this week and will continue this into next week. Students made maps this week of their bedrooms and yards. When mapping their back yard they used a key. Sometime this week or the next I will be surprising them with a treasure hunt using a map.