Mrs. Brown's Kindergarten Blog

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Week in Review-Apples

Reading:

This week in reading we focused on a new strategy called “Listen with Understanding”. This strategy has the student focus on his/her listening skills when hearing a story OR when reading their own story. If we don’t listen or pay attention to story, we will have a difficult remembering what we read. We also reviewed “Check for Understanding” and “Print Concepts”.

In our accuracy lessons this week, we focused on ending sounds. We used our picture dice to practice our ending sounds, as well as matching picture cards to magnetic letters and matching picture cards to other picture cards that end with the same ending sound.

Our poem this week was called “Down by the Station”. We had a lot of fun reading the poem in silly voices on Wacky Wednesday, learning the motions to the poem and focusing on the different between letters, words and sentences using the words in our poem!

We used an app called Educreations this week to review one of our vocabulary words. Watch the video below to see the lesson in action! We will continue to use this app for a few weeks and then the students will complete their own lessons using it!

Rolling our picture dice to practice ending sounds!

We started using our iPads during our Daily 5 reading block. The students are starting out with skill practice apps to get used to the iPads, searching for apps and the rotation. We will begin using creation apps after we have had more practice!

We played a game called SNAP this week. This game is a review game that we will play just about every week. To start the game off we are reviewing our letter names and sounds. We will eventually move to sight words, cvc words and more! If a student pulls out the word "SNAP" with a picture of an alligator on it we all say "awwww snap!" and all of our cards have to go back in the bucket. There were a lot of giggles with this game!

Writing:

We finished our letters this week for handwriting! We had so much fun taking these first few weeks of school to focus on each letter, practice writing those letters and completing a fun activity that went along with each letter every day. This week we worked with Kk and Zz. So much fun! The rest of the week we practiced all of our letters A-Z by making the letters out of Play-doh, writing them on dry erase boards, painting our letters and the end of the week we made an ABC video on our iPad using the app iMovie! The video is below, check it out!

Math:

This week in math we focused on all of our numbers 1-20. We practiced recognizing, counting and writing our numbers 1-20. We watched fun videos, played apps on our iPads and worked together to write and count even past our number 20! We introduced a new choice at Math by Myself where students create numbers and shapes using Play-doh and the number and shapes mats. We will begin learning our other choices during Math Daily 3 soon!

Content:

APPLES, APPLES, APPLES! We had a tasty week all about apples! We learned how an apple tree grows from seed, to sprout, tree, leaves, flowers, more leaves, and then turns into green apples and then red! We investigated our apples, read books about apples and finished the week with an apple taste test! We ate our apples, applesauce, apple pie, apple muffins and apple juice! So much fun!

Just a little fun...hoping for the Cubs post season clinch this weekend! (update, they clinched their post season play! Go Cubs Go!!)

PRACTICE AT HOME:

Be sure to be reading the sight words on the yellow cards every night! Reviewing all of them every day, will help your child master these words in both reading and writing. Have your child quiz you, write the sight words in shaving cream, find the words in books at home, menus at a restaurant or even spell them out with a chant or a cheer!

Next Week:

In reading we will learn the CAFE strategy "Name the Characters".
In writing we will begin learning about Writer's Workshop.
In math we will focus on sorting and more!
Our theme next week is all about PUMPKINS!

Important Dates/Information:

9/30 Field Trip to Exploration Acres
10/9 End of First 9 Weeks
10/19-10/22 Parent/Teacher Conferences
10/30-Grandparent's Day 10-11AM (more info to come)

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Week in Review--Mo Willems

Reading:

This week in reading we focused on the CAFE strategy "Match the pictures to the words." We practiced this strategy as a group, individuals and with partners. We used read alouds and leveled readers to find words that match pictures on the page to help us as learning readers! Our accuracy focus this week was mainly on those hard working vowels at the beginning of the week and then we continued the week with all of the letters of the alphabet. We watched one of our favorite videos, "Vowel Bat" (see the video below), found vowels in books, played a letter toss mat game, letter sound bingo and learned how to play our new Friday game called WHAMMY! We will add sight words and word family words throughout the school year each week to our WHAMMY buckets!

Looking for those hardworking vowels!

BINGO!

WHAMMY in action!

Math:

This week in math we found different ways to make the numbers 6-10! We started learning how to make tally marks too!

We began learning about our first choice during Math Daily 3. This choice is similar to Read to Self, is called Math by Myself. This choice has students practicing various math skills, games and activities during math time independently. Our first choices during this time are geo board shapes and white board number writing! We also learned a new game on our iPads called 123 Ninja. This app has students practice their number recognition, they loved it!

Writing:

This week in writing we learned all about the letters Hh, Vv, Yy, Ww and Xx. We had so much fun creating a house out of the H, volcano out the V, glued yarn on a Y, made a worm out of the W crawling on the grass and played music while gluing the xylophone together for the X! We are loving our letter of the day lessons and will finish up with the last two letters next week!

Content:

This week was all about the author Mo Willems. We mainly focused on his pigeon books but also love his elephant and piggy books. We watched a video where the author talked about what it means to be an author and an illustrator and why he wants kids to continue learning to write and draw. We then created our own sentences to go along with the book Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. Each student changed the last word "bus" to something else that they wouldn't want the pigeon to drive. We finished the week off by creating our own pigeon out of a toilet paper roll! Too much fun!

Other:

These kids never cease to amaze me and make me laugh. Friday during our morning recess was one of those times that reminds me how much I love my job. The kids were outside playing and came up to me with pure joy and excitement saying "Mrs. Brown!! We found a dinosaur footprint!!" Then a few minutes later they informed me that they found a dinosaur bone by the basketball hoop. I just love it! I recorded video and took a picture below! Enjoy!