Welcome to Kindergarten!

Hello Kindergarten families and friends!

I am SO excited to start this year together. We've already been in school for 5 days (we count how many school days we've had EVERY day during our calendar!), and I can tell this year is going to be wonderful!

I hope that your family will be part of our blog posts for the 2017-2018 school year. It's a great way to take a glimpse into your student's day and classroom. It also is a great conversation starter with your little one if they don't remember (haha!) what they did in school. I will try to post 2 to 3 times each month with math, science, reading, writing, and art activities.

If you have any questions about the blog, please comment or send me an email any time!

I can't wait to see you all next week at South School's Curriculum Night!

<3 Mrs. I

Opinions Are GOOD!

Which pet would you get?

As we move into the spring, your students are REALLY flying with their personal narrative writing. This is writing that focuses on an activity, event, or experience that is true, that has happened to them, and they feel they can write a full story about.

During this time, they are also REALLY flying with their sight word knowledge, letter/sound correspondence, and writing many sounds they hear in their words. It's time now to explore and experience new styles of writing.

Right now, we're focusing on writing our opinions and using the word because to tell the reader WHY they think one thing is the best or better than another.

One of our first attempts at writing our own opinion was writing which pet they would get and why. They had to use the word because to let the reader know they were giving their opinion and the pet had to be real - no dinosaurs, dragons, or unicorns!

The writing was outstanding! Here are a few examples of their writing and which pet they would get if they could.

I want a chihuahua because I can dress them up. They are small.

I want a cat because they are cute and let me pet them.

I want a puppy because they are little.

Tricky, Tricky Math!

As we move into the spring, our math concepts become increasingly complex, but REALLY fun! Recently, we began working on understanding how addition works and what we do when we add numbers together.

The first idea we work on is knowing the when you put two small numbers "together" they make one bigger number.

Sometimes we use what is called a number bond (below) to show the students our two small numbers coming together to make a bigger number. This is also called part - part - whole (and when we work on subtraction later this year, we'll call it whole - part - part).

This is a number bond where the students see the Whole - Part - Part of a number.

A skill we've worked on A LOT this year is SHOWING our work and thinking. The students are encouraged to create a math model - drawing, ten frame, number line (in older grades), tallies, whatever works for them! - to show their thinking. Here is what that looks like...

Math models help show a student's thinking and how they reached the answer of a problem.
So far, we've focused a lot on drawings AND using 10-frames to help show their thinking.

The last concept we work on, and will continue to work on through the rest of the year, is the idea of finding ALL number combinations that make up a number. For example, we focus on the number 5 for much of our time. My goal is for the students to become fluent in their number facts to at least 5 by the end of the year and know that 5 can be 0 +5, 1+4, 2+3, 3+2, 4+1, and 5+0 (illustrated below with the staircase).

Staircase showing ALL the ways we can make 5.

Addition is the basis of ALL our math skills, so creating a solid foundation and base for their math skills is such an important part of our work together this year.

100 Days Smarter!

On Friday, February 3, we celebrated our 100th Day of School!

The kids have been working very hard on counting to 100 and have been able to count in a big group to 100 by ones in just 2 minutes and 43 seconds! They're still working on beating this record.

To celebrate, we made lots of 100th Day projects including what we will be doing when we're 100 years old, what our favorite thing has been in 100 days of kindergarten, and a 100th Day crown where we counted by 10s to 100.

Happy 100th Day!

Below are a few highlights of our day.

When I'm 100 Years Old, I will...

Watch TV

Get a New Pet.

Be rich.

All of our 100 Year Old Wishes!

What Does 100 Look Like? Homework Project

100 Small Black Beans

100 Gold Fish

I Know an Old Lady...

Before Thanksgiving break, the class began to practice retelling stories in a group and to a partner. I always kick-off this learning by having the students retell a familiar story we've read a few times and one that has repetitive language.

There's no better story to start them with than...I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Pie! 

This story is funny, catchy, and a perfect finish to our Thanksgiving learning during November. 

Once we've read the story a few times, the students color and cut out their own Old Lady, we add a clear plastic baggie to her stomach, and then we add her meal in one food at a time! The students have SO much fun retelling the story to each other and making sure they get the sequencing correct.

 

 

Make sure to have your student retell you the story I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Pie, it's a ton of fun!

Where Are All The Turkeys?

A HUGE thank you to all of the families who took the time to create a disguised turkey for our classroom! These are some of the best and most creative turkeys I've ever seen! We had a dog, Elsa, princesses, police officers, superheros, and Golden State Warriors!

Here are all of the amazing turkeys from our classroom this year!

All of our AWESOME turkeys!

 

It's Been FAR Too Long!

It has been FAR too long since I've posted about the happenings in our classroom! October was such a busy, busy month for all of us. Let me recap the activities, learning and fun that has been happening. I also created a slideshow of all our photos from October for you to take a look through!

October brought learning about leaves, pumpkins, bats and season changes.

To begin the month, we watched the leaves on the trees change color and begin to fall to the ground. In science, we talked about the season changing to fall and how that changes our weather, the temperature (because weather and temperature aren't the same thing!), and how the animals and plants in our environment change, too. We then created our own Leaf Creatures after reading the book, Leaf Man, by Lois Ehlert.

We then moved to pumpkins and talked about the life cycle of a pumpkin. We created our own pumpkins that, as you pulled out the ribbon from the inside, showed the many steps of a pumpkin's life from being a seed that gets planted to an orange pumpkin ready for picking.

To make our pumpkin learning fun, because what's better than fun?, we read the book Spookly the Square Pumpkin. In this book, a pumpkin, Spookly, saves the day with his square shape during a terrible storm. To tie in math and literacy, we created our own pumpkin patch with all different colors, shapes and sizes!

At the end of the month, we looked at bats, what we knew about bats, and then what we learned about bats. Bats are an animal that hibernates through the winter, which has begun our discovery and learning about animal that hibernate and those that migrate to tie in with our weather and season study in science.

I hope you made it through to the end of this post - sorry for so much writing, I try NEVER to have this much before a photo! Thanks for sticking with me and I promise to post about our thankful Thanksgiving learning soon!





October Classroom Activities 2016 by Slidely Slideshow