Mrs. Brown's Kindergarten Blog

Friday, January 27, 2017

Week in Review--100th Day of School!

Reading:

In reading this week, we learning all about the strategy “Main Idea and Key Details”. Recognizing the main idea in a text is a necessary component to reading comprehension. If a reader is unable to identify the main idea of a selection, they will most likely be lost sorting through the details and trying to makes sense of it all. The strategy of Using the Main Idea and Supporting Details to Determine Importance requires a ot of modeling and practice. Providing parents with a resource to help support their child is just one more way to increase a reader's understanding of the strategy. It gives parents an opportunity to reinforce skills taught in school and provides more practice for the child, which we all know is essential in reading instruction

To kick off our learning of this week’s word families (that’s right we now have TWO word families), we watched a video that had us reading and learning new words that end with the -un and -ub 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 -un and -ub words and we practiced rhyming with all of the words in each family.

Our vocabulary words this week went with the story Duck and Goose. We loved learning all about the words notice, snooze, confusion, webbed, attention and apologize.

Our new sight words: they, where

**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

Pebble Go/Draw & Tell: We used two of our favorite apps this week to learn and tell about Polar Animals. We watched, listened and read about a polar animal of our choosing using the website Pebble Go and then drew and told something we learned about that animal using the app Draw and Tell. After completing the assignment, we saved our stories and uploaded them to Google Classroom!
Sky Write: We practiced reading and writing words in our H brothers word families using the app Sky Write.
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.

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 kept on working on the planning page and became quite the experts at filling it out with our ideas. We finished the week by learning how to transfer our thoughts and writings from the planning page to the actual book! We just started this at the end of the week and will continue to learn and practice doing this next week.

Math:

Math this week we learned all about the vocabulary term hundred. We were introduced to the this work on our 100th day of school and continued to work with the number all week. We learned that when 100 cubes are put together in groups of ten, they make a hundred block!

We also continued to practice with subtraction using our new rekenreks, a floor number line and more! We are becoming rock-stars with subtraction!

Content:

This week was all about the 100th day of school!

Monday--We celebrated our 100th day of school by starting the day off with a 100’s day hat, played “Would you Rather” with 100 themed items, went on a 100 words hunt around our classroom, learned our poem that ended up having 100 letters in it, wrote a sentence about something we would do when we are 100 that went along with a picture of us as 100 years old, added 100 gumballs to a gumball machine, sorted 10 different snacks into 10 pieces to have 100 pieces of snack and read several books about the number 100.
Tuesday--We added 101 spots to a dalmatian dog.
Wednesday--We added more words to our 100 words book.
Thursday--We continued to add words to our 100 words book.
Friday--We went on a QR code hunt around our room scanning and finding various numbers and coloring them in on a hundred chart page to reveal a surprise picture! *Hint it was the number 100 ;).

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 FAIRNESS. We started the week off by reading the story It’s Not Fair and discussing what it means to be fair with our fairness poster. The next day, we watched a video story about an elephant, giraffe and hare in a zoo and how they thought their food portions weren’t fair but at the end of the book they realized that fair is not equal. Elephant needs a lot more food than the other two and they ended up keeping their own amount. We finished the week by sorting scenarios into something that is fair or something that is equal. We learned that there are sometimes where things might be equal with one another and other times that might be fair which means someone might be getting something or is able to do something we aren’t and that is okay because it is most likely something that will help them be successful.

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

-What is something you are able to do that maybe a brother or sister is not?

-What is something that is the same for everyone?

-What does it mean to be fair?

PRACTICE AT HOME:

Have your child count as high as they can! The goal by the end of kindergarten is to 100, and if your child can already count to 100...have them count even higher, count by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s!

Next Week:

In reading we will focus on “Tell a Connected Story”.
In writing we will continue to write Information Writing.
In math we will work on tens and ones!
Our theme next week is all about penguins!

Important Dates/Information:

**Go to our classroom webpage if you want to see important dates on a calendar! I will update this classroom calendar as dates and events come about.

2/9--Parent University--Family STEM night! 5:45-7:30PM
2/20--President’s Day NO SCHOOL (make-up snow day if needed)
3/3--Movie Night K-2
3/10--End of 3rd Nine Weeks
3/13-3/17--Parent Teacher Conferences
3/27-3/31--Spring Break NO SCHOOL

Friday, January 20, 2017

Week in Review--Polar Bears

Reading:

In reading this week, we learning all about the strategy “Predict What Will Happen and Then Confirm”. As adult readers we make predictions often without even realizing it. We do it when we watch movies, read a book, or hear someone tell us a story. It is a way of focusing our attention and motivating us to want to hear or read more. Children benefit from predicting in the same way. Therefore, it is important that we guide them to not only predict what will happen, but to also confirm their predictions. To predict, readers tell what they think will happen in the story. To confirm, readers find out if their predictions were true, partially true, or way off. Using this strategy gives readers the chance to make connections to the text, think ahead, and become more engaged.

To kick off our learning of this week’s word families (that’s right we now have TWO word families), we watched a video that had us reading and learning new words that end with the -ut and -ug sounds. We built words in the -ut and -un families, we went on a word hunt where we chopped the sounds up in the word and found it in a pile of other -ut and -ug words and we practiced rhyming with all of the words in each family.

Our vocabulary words this week went with the story Red Eyes, Blue Feathers. We loved learning all about the words sly, scent, communicate, temperature, survive and mood. Later in the week we reviewed the word

Our new sight words: for, him

**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:

**Due to the NWEA middle of the year benchmark testing, we did not have iPad choice this week. Our iPads were bundled up with the other kindergarten classes so all students could have an iPad to take the test at the same time in each class. We will pick back up with our iPad choices next week! We also are getting 5 new iPads to add to our classroom and that will put us at a half a class set! We are so excited!

Writing:

Writer’s Workshop this week, we continued to practice writing and filling in the planning/idea page that goes with our information writing unit. We completed one page together as a class to make that three total that we did together and then on Tuesday, students were off on their own writing their own pages about a topic they are experts in! They have to know at least three different facts about the topic in order to be considered an expert. We continued the rest of the week perfecting filling out the planning page. We will work next week on transferring the planning page to a book!

Math:

Math this week we learned all about the vocabulary term minus. We were introduced to a friend of Gus the Plus named Linus the Minus. We learned that he likes to take things away from math problems. Whenever we see or hear his symbol/name we know that we are taking away! We continued through the rest of the week practicing subtraction. We learned a new game for Math by Myself called “Smash It”. The idea of this game has students create Play-doh balls according to the subtraction problem and smash the correct number of balls down that the problem says to take away. Students write the answer on the answer page when finished and move on to the next problem. For the rest of the week practicing subtraction we used our iPads and learned how to subtract using the app Doodle Buddy and used our ten frame paddles too!

Content:

This week was all about Martin Luther King Jr and Polar Animals!

Monday--We learned about who Martin Luther King Jr. was and why he was so important. We then completed our own dream pages!
Tuesday--We read a small book introducing us to several types of arctic animals!.
Wednesday--We read a story about polar bears.
Thursday--We completed a story sequence page that went with the story we read the day before.
Friday--We completed our second STEM challenge! Our task was to create a snow den for a polar animal using toothpicks and various sizes of marshmallows. We also tested out whether having "blubber" on our body keeps us warmer than having nothing. We put our hand in a bag of blubber and put it in a bowl of ice water and our hand that wasn't in the blubber and we compared which one felt warmer. We decided we would much rather have the blubber if we were a polar animal!

Click on the link below to see the students sharing their STEM challenges!

Sharing our Arctic Den STEM Challenge

Social Emotional Learning (SEL):

This week’s SEL focus was continuing our learning about FRIENDSHIP. We started the week off by completing a couple more of our friendship task cards that gave us a situation that friends might encounter and we discussed how we would handle it. We also read a story written by Mo Willems, one of our favorite authors that was about sharing with our friends. We finished the week by discussing how our words affect our friends. We felt sand paper and cotton balls and learned that we want our words to feel more like cotton balls towards others and not sand paper. At the end of the week we worked on showing our friendship skills towards others. Every time a skill was caught or recognized that student(s) received a piece of paper chain to add to our Friendship Chain. Our goal was to have so many students showing friendship that our chain would go from the top of the door and touch the ground by the end of the week. And we did it!

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

-What is one thing you can do at school to be a good friend?

-What is something you would like for a friend to do for you?

-What is something you love and enjoy doing with your friends?.

PRACTICE AT HOME:

Have your child tell you about our STEM challenge on Friday. Ask them any challenges or successes they had while working on building the arctic animal den. It was such a fun experiene and the laughter, conversation and teamwork was an absolute teaching WIN to witness!