Mrs. Brown's Kindergarten Blog: Week in Review--Penguins!

Friday, February 3, 2017

Week in Review--Penguins!

Reading:

In reading this week, we learning all about the strategy “Retell a Story in Sequence”. When parents ask their child what happened in school that day, the response is usually one of two things. Either they are given a play by play synopsis or they are given the single word “nothing”. The strategy of retelling is similar. Retelling a story helps the reader recall what is happening in the story they are reading. It allows the reader to stop and monitor their comprehension and understanding of the story. A retelling usually includes the characters, setting, problem/solution and the main idea of the text. It involves telling what is important without telling too much. Many times children struggle with the concept of weeding out what is important. Often they give every single detail or they give a vague description that is hard to follow. We stop during our reading to think out loud what we have learned, what has happened. This often helps with retelling and comprehension of the story as well.

To kick off our learning of this week’s word families we watched a video that had us reading and learning new words that end with the -ick and -ing sounds. We built words in both families, we went on a word hunt where we chopped the sounds up in the word and found it in a pile of other -ick or -ing words and we practiced rhyming with all of the words in each family.

Our vocabulary words this week went with the book The Emperor’s Egg. We loved learning all about the words miserable, trundles, pouch, trumpeting, horizon and racket.

Our new sight words: all, was

**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

Pic Collage Polar Animals: We used one of our favorite apps, Pic Collage this week to design our own picture using a polar bear or penguin and writing three facts about that animal we have learned. Once completing the assignment, we saved our stories and uploaded them to Google Classroom!
Rocket Speller: We played a spelling game called Rocket Speller and it was so fun learning, spelling and flying into outer space!
Reading Eggs/QR Books: Third round all students completed lessons in Reading Eggs and/or listened to stories on “tape” using QR codes inside picture books.

Check out all of our Pic Collage pictures from this week!

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.
QR Code Subtraction + Doodle Buddy: We scanned a QR code that showed a specific subtraction problem and then wrote and solved that problem using the app Doodle Buddy!

Writing:

Writer’s Workshop this week, was continuing to focus on informative writing. We focused on taking our planning pages and writing what we wrote into a book. We took our brief one worded statements from the planning page and put those into sentences to fill in a book! Once the books were finished we published our writing using Book Creator!

Math:

Math this week we learned all about the vocabulary term ones and tens. We were introduced to this new vocabulary word and practiced all week taking numbers 1-20 and drawing and using math tools to break those numbers apart into pieces. We learned a new choice to Number Work where we get to take math tools and illustrate ones and tens depending on the number we draw out of the pile!

Content:

This week was all about Penguins!

Monday--We watched videos on Pebble Go with our iPad partners all about penguins!
Tuesday--We learned how to use an app called Padlet.
Wednesday--We used what we learned with the app Padlet to make predictions with our iPad partner to specific questions about penguins.
Thursday--We checked our predictions from the previous day to see if we were correct using one of our favorite penguin books!
Friday--We made penguins out of different shapes and colors!

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 SELF-CONTROL. We learned that self-control means we are in charge of our own actions and how we respond and handle ourselves in different situations. We started the week off by reading a story called What If Everybody Did That. This book was absolutely wonderful because it talked about what if everyone threw trash out of their car window, or what if everyone shouted out to the teacher during story time and other examples along those lines. We discussed how sometimes we really want to get up and do something we want to do, or say something during a time we are supposed to be listening or even sometimes we get into someone else’s bubble because we don’t mind being too close to someone but they might not want us that close. We have to be respectful and control ourselves to behave in different situations and everyone is in charge of their own actions. We continued the week by discussing good vs poor choices and watched a video story about a student named Clark the Shark who had a hard time controlling himself. He learned ways to help himself stay calm and in control. We had such a great week learning about self-control and we are excited to continue the learning next week!

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

-Was there ever a time you knew you had to be quiet but you weren’t? What did you do when you realized you weren’t quiet?

-Do you know of a time you weren’t able to control yourself in public? In a restaurant? In the grocery store? At the movies? How did you behave?

-What is the difference between behaving at school and at home? Is there anything that is the same? Different?