Mrs. Brown's Kindergarten Blog: Week in Review--Valentine's Day

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Week in Review--Valentine's Day

Writing:

We continued to work on informational writing this week. We also focused on adding in verbs, labels and text features! Adding in these things helps the reader learn more information about the topic we are writing about. Labels are found in the illustration and can point to parts that we are teaching in the setnences below, as well as other important thigns included in the picture that is not included in the writing. Text features are usually seen in the writing, but can also be added to the picture to add details. Text features have writers underline special words, make them BOLD and BIG, wiggly, bubble letters, different colors and more! As soon as we talked about adding these text features to our writing, so many students began to add them in their sentences!

We continued to follow the process where students fill out a planning sheet then turn those ideas into sentences in a book and publish their stories in Book Creator. Below are a few videos of published books!

Reading:

This week we focused on the reading strategy “Back Up and Reread”. Have you ever been reading a book, gotten to the end of a page and realized you didn't remember anything you just read? Have you started over two or three times before actually making yourself concentrate on what you are reading. This happens to readers of all ages. Why? It could be due to a lack of interest (I am remembering many college textbooks now), not enough background knowledge, or perhaps unfamiliar vocabulary. Maybe something on our mind keeps crowding in. No matter what the reason, there is only one thing we can do to get full meaning out of what we are reading. We need to back up and reread and then check for understanding again. These two reading strategies often go hand in hand. After introducing your students to the reading strategy Check for Understanding, use the strategy Back Up and Reread to aid in understanding what may have been missed the first time. Once you have introduced this strategy, follow up by sending the Parent Pipeline home so parents can support this strategy use at home.

This week we also focused on the “-un and -an” word families. We created word family lists, played a game called a word hunt and added the new words into our Friday game of SNAP!

Our vocabulary words this week were:

creaks

howling

path

hare

hinge

sways

We enjoyed learning about these words and created one page of a book with a group of our friends. We worked together to decide who would take the picture of the vocabulary word, who would be recorded explaining the definition and who would draw a picture of the word. They worked so well together and divided up the work so nicely! I was very impressed! We put the pages together, watch the video below!

Math:

We focused on subtraction this week. We learned about a special guy named “Linus the Minus” who likes to take things away. Whenever we see him in a math problem he is taking numbers away and the answer will always be less. We practiced subtraction with pictures and math tools. We will continue next week by working with subtracting with number lines and drawing a picture to help see the numbers/items go away.

We had a new choice added to Math by Myself this week. This choice practices subtraction and is called “Smash It”. Students read a subtraction problem and create play-doh balls for the first number in the problem. The second number then tells the student how many of the balls they get to “smash” and then they write the answer down! We have found subtracting is so much fun when you get to smash the play-doh down!

Our math vocabulary word(s) this week focused on height. They were longer and shorter. We discussed the words, then we wrote and drew pictures that showed what the words mean in our math journals.

Content:

This week was all about Valentine’s Day. We created special Valentine Cards using the app Pic Collage, we created a class book using Book Creator about things we love, talked about kindness and celebrated at the end of the week with our Valentine’s Party. We created our own canisters to receive Valentine’s from our friends and enjoyed decorating cookies!