Week in Review--Polar Animals and New Year's Resolutions!

Writing:

 

-We began the week by reviewing our writer’s workshop procedures, expectations and jobs. We then continued to review other pieces of writing like what makes our writing easy to read, conventions like meatball spaces, capital/lower case letters and punctuation! After refreshing our minds on what makes us great writers, we talked about how to start our first sentence in our stories by using a good lead. A few of our favorite words to use at the beginning of a story are “One day….At the beginning….First….In the morning”. I modeled my own story about a time I played outside over winter break with my daughter and the class helped me come up with the beginning of my story. I am excited to continue to see the class grow and succeed as young writers.

Math:

-We learned all about comparing groups of objects by using the terms greater than, less than and equal to. We first talked about the words themselves and then used them by comparing the groups with a partner. After a couple days of practicing this, we put it into a station for Math with Someone.

-We also practiced counting on from any given number and counting on ten. For example, we started at the number 7 and counted on from 7 all the way to 17. We will also practice counting on from numbers in the 20’s, 30’s and higher.

















Content (last week):

On our short 2 hour delay , which was also our first day back to school after winter break, we talked about what a New Year's Resolution is and why people make them. We brainstormed a list of ideas that we, as kindergarten students could do to make ourselves better "us's" in the new year. A few of my favorites were to read more books, better behavior and to help out at home!

Reading:

-We had THREE sight words this week-- “will, be, this”.

-The CAFÉ strategy we worked on this week was the strategy.

“Author’s Purpose

An author's purpose is the author's reason for writing. When you ask yourself why an author wrote a specific text, you are asking about the author's purpose. Often author's write to entertain, to inform, or to persuade. Another common reason is to give instructions or to tell readers how to make or do something. Sometimes an author may have more than one purpose.

There are three reasons why author’s write various pieces:

Persuade	Inform	Entertain
-commercials -advertisements -editorials	-textbooks -news articles -nonfiction texts -biographies	-poetry -short stories -novels -picture books

 

How can you help your child with this strategy at home?

 

1.     When looking and reading a book have your child predict what the author’s purpose was for writing the book before even reading it. Then after reading the book, discuss if they changed their mind or if they were correct.

2.     Ask your child what clues they can find within the text that helped them decide their choice.

3.     Go through all of the books on your book shelf that you have read over and over and sort them into the three different possibly choices for author’s purpose.

We worked on our "H" brother sounds this week. Ch, Th, Wh, Sh and Ph are all part of the H brother family! We came up with words and used our puppets to decide which word had which brother!

 

Listening to I Wanna Iguana after learning about Author's Purpose!

Our poem this week was titled "Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar". We tried all week trying to find out who in fact stole the cookies by placing every person in our class's name on the poem. We found out on Friday that Mrs. Brown stole the cookies! Lucky for us, she brought them back and gave each of the students a cookie!




















Content:

This week was all about Polar Animals. We started the week off by learning what several polar animals are, what their babies are called, where they live, what they eat and how and why they hide. We continued the week by studying specifically about penguins and polar bears!































Other:

We had our 2nd nine weeks behavior celebration Thursday morning. Coyote Chris came to our school with several exotic and artic animals. Our favorite was the surprise guest at the end...a real live reindeer!