A Little Red House With No Doors, No Windows and a Star Inside!

Today we read a story about a little red house with no windows, no doors and star inside. After reading this story, we found out the little house was actually an apple. We took each of our apples and cut them in half to see if they were a lucky apple that had a star inside. We found that every single apple in our classroom was a lucky apple and had a star inside! We are a lucky group of kindergarteners!

 

Come and Listen

Our poem this week was titled Come and Listen. I did not have my flip video camera today to take video, but I did take a great looking group photo! The poem was read to the tune of the childhood song "Where is Thumbkin".

Zoo Phonics!

For one of my CAFE mini-lessons, we practiced letter sounds using our Zoo Phonics cards. I passed out a Zoo Phonics card to each student and said a letter sound. If the student had the letter with the sound I said, they took their card and found the matching letter in the pocket chart. We filled up our entire chart!

 

Apples!

Today we read a Weekly Reader all about apples. We discussed how the Weekly Reader is a magazine and magazines are like books, but have a few differences. We learned four different things that people do with apples and we brainstormed a few additional ideas that were not pictured. We also learned the different parts of the apple and why each part is important. On the back page, we numbered the different phases of the apple tree's life from beginning in winter to ending in fall! I placed the smaller versions of the magazine in the fall basket in our bookcase for students who would like to choose one to put in their book box for Read to Self when they go shopping for new books.

Apple Graph

During math time today we first created our own Apple Graph. I passed out different colors and amounts of paper apples to a few students. Each student counted the number of apples. We talked about how we first had to sort the apples by color and then when we were counting we put the apples into a new pile so we knew which apples we already counted. After counting and coloring in the correct number of boxes I asked the class to tell me any observations about the graph now that it was finished. Here are a few of their ideas....

"The green apples are more than the yellow and the red."

"The yellow apples are exactly in the middle of the red and the green."

"The red apples have the smallest."

"I know the green apples have the most because they are the tallest."

I love when my class has such great dialouge after a lesson and with little to no prompting by me! We will create another apple graph later in the week where they will color the boxes independently.

1st Surfer of the Week!

I started "Surfer of the Week" in my classroom today. Each student is assigned his/her own special week. I put a picture of the student, their name and any special papers or pictures they bring in on the surfing bulletin board. This student has a special time each day where he/she shares special interests, pictures or anything else important to him/her with the class. The child's parents are also encouraged to come in one day to share something with their child's class. Parent's in the past have read a book, described their job, played a game or made a craft with the class. We are excited to hear all about our first surfer of the week this week and many more to come!

Daily 5 Reading & Math Video

Below is video taken during both my Daily 5 Reading time and my Daily 5 Math time. As you can see, both Daily 5's are based on independent tasks for the students to be working on while I am working with kids. We are now to the point where they can complete four Daily 5 Reading choices and 3 Daily 5 Math choices independently and I am starting to pull strategy groups and one on one conferring with students.

Daily 5 Reading

Daily 5 Math