Welcome Back to School!

Welcome to the class of 2031! I am so excited to start the school year with a new group of students and families! 

We're going to have such a FUN and EXCITING year! 

Happy First Day of School, everyone!

<3 Mrs. I

When It Rains Writing

I love this time of year in kindergarten. The students are really putting together all of the skills we've been working on all year - letter sounds, tapping words, sight words, punctuation, spaces between words! It's really amazing to see them bloom.

One of the biggest indicators of growth is their writing. This past week, we made a little project about what they like to do when it rains. Here they all are in our hallway on display for the school to see!

What do you do when it rains projects hanging proudly in the hallway!

The students had to write about their opinion a few weeks ago, and this writing prompt is similar to those. I am looking to see if they can tell me what they REALLY like to do when it rains - some of them don't like to play in the rain, and if that's true what DO they like? Here are a few examples of our projects and writing.

When it rains, I dance.

When it rains I like to have fun.

When it rains I like to play in the muddy puddles.

When it rains I like to play inside.

The kids LOVE this project. I also love their creativity once they've created the rain gear with our tracers. The background and their faces are amazing!

Subtraction SMASH!

For the past several weeks, we have been working on learning more about subtraction. We start off with the concept of "breaking apart" - that one large number can be broken into two smaller numbers. Then we begin using the term "take away" so that the students understand that the smaller number is taken away from the larger one, leaving another small number. 

To illustrate the idea of "take away," we played a little game I like to call SUBTRACTION SMASH!

We took a small amount of Play-Doh, made five small balls, and "smashed" the number to take it away from five. 

Here we are, getting ready to SMASH!

We smashed, or took away, two from our five.... 

Five SMASH Two leaves me with?!

 Working together, we discovered that there is a pattern when taking away numbers from larger ones. We also used this strategy when we were learning addition to be sure we found ALL of the ways to make a larger number. This time, we used smaller numbers to take away from five to find the pattern (although, Mrs. I didn't quite get the pattern in order today....!).

Ask your student about Subtraction SMASH! I'm sure they'd love to practice subtraction at home if you let them smash some things!

Mindfulness in Kindergarten

This year in kindergarten, we are working with Mrs. Howard and learning about Mindfulness. What is it? What does it mean? How do we do it?

Over the past few weeks, Mrs. Howard has joined our class to teach us about deep breathing and how to use our breath to focus and to calm our bodies. We are learning to try and focus JUST on our breathing and to help clear our minds of the clutter and noise that is ever-present in our lives. 

We are also an Open Circle school and we have learned about calm breathing where we fill our balloons and deflate the balloon OR flower breathing where we breathe in the flower and breathe it out. 

Flower breathing with movements!
Breathe in the flower, breathe it out!

Today, Mrs. Howard joined us to teach us a few more breathing techniques by using our bodies to also calm down our breathing and be more mindful of our breathing.

Practicing our breathing with Mrs. Howard

Using our bodies also helps us focus on our breathing
and being more mindful of where our bodies are in space.

So, the next time your student or maybe even yourself needs to take a few deep, mindful breathes, they can practice using their bodies and our breathing techniques!

2 and 3 is 5

Up to this point, we've been working on identifying our numerals in kindergarten and understanding that the number 5 means that we have 5 of something - cupcakes, balls, fish, or friends. As we move into our new topic, Understanding Addition, we will slow down a little and take our time to really understand the relationship numbers have with each other and practice putting numbers together to make a bigger number.

I begin our addition learning telling the students that addition is taking two smaller groups and putting them together to make one big group, or part - part - whole. We use the below visual, a number bond, to practice that concept. (When we get into subtraction, we will also use number bonds but will call them whole - part - part.)

The two smaller groups are called the part,
the bigger group is called the whole.

We use visuals A LOT during the early stages of learning addition to help the students see the parts of the whole group. Today, we colored in groups of objects in two different colors, recorded our two smaller numbers, then what our big number is. 

Language is also very important at this stage of our addition learning. We use the language 2 and 3 IS 5 or 2 and 3 MAKE 5 to help the students understand that these numbers, when put together to make the "big" group or the "whole", we will ALWAYS get 5.

Here, we counted the first group of circles,
recorded the number, counted the second group and then put them together.

We use one-to-one correspondence (pointing or crossing off objects as we count)
 to make sure we count correctly.

Then, we record the number of objects before putting them together.

Eventually, we will move towards recording our number equations (or sometimes we call them sentences) in the traditional way, 2 + 3 = 5. We will focus more on the operations of writing number equations after the winter break!

Let's Eat Pie..and Bread...and Squash...and a Pot?!

I know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie!

It's my favorite time of year again! It's time to begin learning how to retell stories in kindergarten AND what better way to start than with the silly Old Lady who eats EVERYTHING at Thanksgiving dinner!

If you're familiar with the song I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, then you'll pick up a slightly revised version of her eating her way straight through Thanksgiving. The students read the story today and worked on creating their Little Old Lady and all of the things she eats during dinner.

We colored in our Little Old Ladies....

Then, we cut out all of the things she ate...pie, turkey, bread, cider...

Then, we get together in groups and retell the story to a friend so that we get the practice remembering what elements of the story came first, next, and last. This is an important skill we will continue to work on throughout our time in kindergarten and is very important to their overall reading comprehension and writing skills.

Retelling the Little Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Pie.

Groups got together to retell their versions of the story.

She even ate a pot! Imagine that!

Ask your student to use their Little Old Lady to retell their version of the new classic!

Letters and Sounds

Over the past two months we have been working on learning the names and sounds of letters using the Fundations curriculum. As of this week we've learned 17 letters and their sounds!

You may have noticed that your student has begun to identify letters and their sounds, but that they also use a keyword to help them remember the sound the letter makes. Like....

A - apple - /a/.....B - bat - /b/

I try to remind the students to "cut off" their letter sounds and not add the "uh" at the end of each sound. So, C really just says c  and not cu! They really love this idea when we get to the letter P and they tell me that P says pu and I say "oh, no! That's stinky! P U??? It's just p!" 

We also challenge ourselves each week we learn new letters to come up with as many words that begin with that letter as possible. This week we thought of the most ever - 38 P words! Here are a few of the lists we've been able to create together!

We thought of 26 words that begin with the letter J!

Sometimes letters also make the sound of the letter we learned like the
soft G or our consonant blend, dr, can sometimes be confused for the J sound.

20 R words! And.....

The most EVER!!! 38 words that begin with P!

I hope your student is bringing home their learning and sharing with you all of the sounds that they've learned so far. It may sound like it's taking a long time to learn our letters and sounds, but it sets us up for really great work in the winter with decoding new words, writing CVC words (I'll have another post about this later), and reading our Just Right Reading Books in the coming months.