Mrs. Brown's Kindergarten Blog: Week in Review-Polar Animals

Monday, February 1, 2016

Week in Review-Polar Animals

Reading:

This week was all about identifying the main idea and key details of a story. Summarizing is one way we teach students to be able to do this skill. Summarizing is taking sections of text and pulling out the most important parts of what was read. It is deciding what is worth remembering in a selection and capturing it in your own words. As readers, it's important to summarize what we read so we can remember, organize, and understand the importance of the selection. Summarizing can often be a challenge for any level of reader. This is because they try to retell the whole story with great detail and struggle with finding the most critical elements of the story.

How to help your child with this strategy at home?

When reading with your child, model how to summarize. After finishing a few pages or a chapter, stop and summarize what has happened. State the main ideas and organize the events of the story.
After reading a story, have your child draw a picture of the most important information of the story. This will help your child to focus on what the main idea of the story was by deciding what parts of the story to include in the picture.
Read one chapter in a book or a portion of a picture book and question your child about what was read. Questions to ask your child after reading include:

What is this section about?
What are the main ideas of this section? What is your evidence?
What is not important to remember in this selection? Why?

This week in reading with our iPads we took pictures of polar animals and put them into the app Pic Collage. After taking the picture we wrote at least three facts we knew about the animal and then we could decorate the picture by changing the back ground and adding stickers!

Vocabulary review! We absolutely LOVED our vocabulary words this week. One of our favorites was about the planets! We learned about each planet and watched a video that sang a song telling us important facts about each planet!

Math:

Last week we learned all about the number 100 and saw what a 100 block piece looks like. This week was all about ten and one block pieces. A group of ten one pieces makes a ten block and ten-ten block pieces make a 100 block piece! We learned how to show those pieces using math tools and in by drawing the number pieces. We also learned how to show number pieces using numbers 10-19. We practiced by drawing the number pieces, using an app for the number pieces and showing the tens/ones in a number bond! We will continue practicing with these number pieces broken down into tens and ones both whole group and we will add them into our math choices!

Writing:

Students wrote their very first informational writing piece this week! They took a topic they were experts in, wrote at least 3 true facts they knew about the topic and filled in a planning page. After the planning page was complete, we used the page to help us write an informational writing book. By the end of the week, each student have a four page informational book written on a topic they were experts in! We will continue writing these types of books for the next several weeks! Eventually we will write the books without needing the planning page.

Content:

We learned all about polar animals this week! We started off the week by watching videos specifically on penguins, polar bears, arctic fox, snowy owls and more with our iPad partners. We then shared what we learned about these animals and created two class Popplets. We went on throughout the week learning what makes these animals so special and even completed our first Google Classroom discussion question sharing what our favorite polar animal is! By the end of the week, we created a penguin out of shapes we have learned in class!

Extra:

We had another Mystery Skype this week! This time our new friends were from Texas! We learned that they rarely get snow, they have two playgrounds (just like us!) and they have a lot of trees!

Another exciting thing happened this week! Mrs. Millburg’s husband is a State Police Trooper and he brought his K9 partner to tell us all about how a dog gets to work and help out the police! We even got to pet the dog and watch him sniff out and find a special treat in the cafeteria. Thank you to Mr. Millburg and Colt for coming to our school!