Mrs. Brown's Kindergarten Blog: 2016-10-23

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Week in Review--Spiders

Reading:

In reading this week, we reviewed one of our three ways to read a book. That third way is to retell a familiar story. We learned that when you retell a story, you do not always have to reread the entire story word for word. When you retell a story you are giving the main idea and a few key details about the beginning, middle and end of the story. Being able to retell a story is an important skill for students to learn. They are able to show comprehension after reading and or listening to a story if they are able to retell it.

We also learned all about the -en family. To kick off our learning of this word family, we watched a video that had us reading and learning new words that end with the -en sound. We built words in the -en family, we went on a word hunt where we chopped the sounds up in the word and found it in a pile of other -en words and we practiced rhyming with all of the words in the -en family.

Our vocabulary words this week went with the story It Is the Wind. We loved learning all about the words creaks, howling, hinge, hare, sways and path. We did not get to do a vocabulary review this week because of the shortened week and Grandparent’s Day.

Our new sight words: has, on

**Be sure to keep the white sight word cards from week to week and continue to practice all of them as new ones are sent home every week.

Our Poem of the Week:

iPad Fun:

Reading

Popplet: We used an app called Popplet this week to practice writing and typing our sight words. We have practiced using this app as a class and for the first time did them on on our own! There are other options in this app, like adding in photos and more! We focused on using the pen and typing tools this week.
Pebble Go This app is linked to a website called Pebble Go. This website offers many educational videos based on specific themes and ideas. This week students focused on watching videos and learning all about spiders!

Math

Book Creator: This week students used the app Book Creator on their own by adding a journal entry of the activity number of the day! We have been doing number of the day as a whole class since the first week of school and they are now experts and are able to do this on their own! They rolled a dice to find their number, wrote the number, the number word, drew the dice, tally marks, number of shapes and number line! They finished the activity by recording their voice explaining their thinking and what they did with the number of the day.
Doodle Buddy: Students scanned a QR code that took them to a voice recording where it told them a number 1-20. They then opened up the app Doodle Buddy and wrote that number and added stamps while counting to that number. When finished, they went to the next QR code, scanned it and did it again!

Writing:

Writer’s Workshop this week focused on writing a True Story. We learned that a true story is something that really happened to us or someone we know and that when writing a true story we have to be sure to include the “who, where and what happened” when writing the it. If we leave one of those main parts out, the reader will be missing out on key information needed to understand the entire story. After our Grandparent’s Day celebration on Wednesday, we wrote a class story about the special day. We decided as a class what to write on each of the pages and completed the book together. We will write another class book next week and will eventually be writing our own books on our own!

Math:

Our math vocabulary word this week was position. We learned how using position words help to describe where an object or something is located. We practiced using these words using objects around the room and drawing shapes according to each word.

Content:

This week was all about SPIDERS!

Monday--We read a short story all about spiders and places they like to live. We also learned how many legs they have.
Tuesday--We read another book that told us all about how spiders grow, what they eat, why they spin webs, what an egg sac is and more!
Wednesday--We compared insects and spiders.
Thursday--We made spiders! We put 8 legs, 8 eyes and two body parts together to make a spider. We then filled in missing parts of a sentence that helped describe all of the parts of a spider.

Social Emotional Learning (SEL):

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.

This week’s SEL focus was continuing our learning about having EMPATHY. We started the week off by reviewing what empathy is and sharing times we have shown empathy. We then read a story about a student named Sam who always came to school with a full and happy heart. Throughout the school day things happen that tear his heart and it begins to break. By the end of the day his heart was completely broken. We talked as a class things we could do to help put his heart back together. As we discussed these things, we put the pieces of his heart back together. We continued our learning through the week by practicing “feelings yoga” moves. We learned that when Mojo was frustrated and stuck in his feeling maze that he takes a deep breath to help calm himself down. We practiced different yoga poses to help us when we are feeling frustrated. To finish the week and our unit on EMPATHY off we completed an illustration sharing how we were feeling and listened to others share how they were feeling and we discussed why we felt the way we did and how it was important for us to recognize and care how others feel.

A few discussion questions to talk with your child at home about this topic:

--When was a time someone showed you that they cared about your feelings?

--Have you ever been stuck in a bad mood maze? What did you do to help yourself get out of the maze?

--If someone is feeling sad, what is something you can do to help them feel better?

Grandparents Day:

What fun we had celebrating our grandparent's on Wednesday morning. We ate cookies, drank juice, made froot loop necklaces, painted our hand on a poem, read stories, played games and puzzles and even drew a portrait of our grandparent. There was a lot of laughter and hugs and we couldn't have enjoyed it more! Thank you to those of you who came, donated and helped out!