Surfer of the Week

Last week, Zackary's mom came in and created a puppy chow recipe with the class that we were able to eat when we were finished! Each student had a job of his/her own and we worked as a team to make the delicious dessert. Yum!

 

Leaf Graphing

This week is all about leaves! We have been reading books about the fall season and the changes leaves on the trees undergo. Today, we took two student's bags of leaves from home and sorted them by color. After we sorted the leaves, we graphed them on our ENO board and discussed the similarities and differences we found after graphing. It looks like we need a few more red leaves to the mix! 

Parent University

Last night was our first Parent University night here at Mayflower. We will have three of these nights throughout the school year. The focus for the first one was on our 90 minute reading block instruction. As a school, we have implemented Daily 5 & CAFE everyday kindergarten through fifth grade. Below is a clip from our local news station WLFI who was there to cover the event. I have also added the video the kindergarten team used to showcase Daily 5 & CAFE to the K parents. We spoke to them about each section of the video before they watched it, in order for them to have a better understanding as to what their child is doing during this reading block as well as what the teacher is doing too!

"Parent University" at area elementary school: wlfi.com

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Exploration Acres!

We went on our first field trip of the year to Exploration Acres. The class and chaperones had a fun filled day, there was so much to do! Once we arrived we went through the straw bale maze, raced pedal cars and rubber duckies and jumped on the mound of hay. We then took a hay ride to visit an 18-acre corn maze and finished the day out in the pumpkin patch where we cut our very own pumpkins off the vine!

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A Little Red House With No Doors, No Windows and a Star Inside!

Today we read a story about a little red house with no windows, no doors and star inside. After reading this story, we found out the little house was actually an apple. We took each of our apples and cut them in half to see if they were a lucky apple that had a star inside. We found that every single apple in our classroom was a lucky apple and had a star inside! We are a lucky group of kindergarteners!

 

Come and Listen

Our poem this week was titled Come and Listen. I did not have my flip video camera today to take video, but I did take a great looking group photo! The poem was read to the tune of the childhood song "Where is Thumbkin".

Zoo Phonics!

For one of my CAFE mini-lessons, we practiced letter sounds using our Zoo Phonics cards. I passed out a Zoo Phonics card to each student and said a letter sound. If the student had the letter with the sound I said, they took their card and found the matching letter in the pocket chart. We filled up our entire chart!

 

Apples!

Today we read a Weekly Reader all about apples. We discussed how the Weekly Reader is a magazine and magazines are like books, but have a few differences. We learned four different things that people do with apples and we brainstormed a few additional ideas that were not pictured. We also learned the different parts of the apple and why each part is important. On the back page, we numbered the different phases of the apple tree's life from beginning in winter to ending in fall! I placed the smaller versions of the magazine in the fall basket in our bookcase for students who would like to choose one to put in their book box for Read to Self when they go shopping for new books.

Apple Graph

During math time today we first created our own Apple Graph. I passed out different colors and amounts of paper apples to a few students. Each student counted the number of apples. We talked about how we first had to sort the apples by color and then when we were counting we put the apples into a new pile so we knew which apples we already counted. After counting and coloring in the correct number of boxes I asked the class to tell me any observations about the graph now that it was finished. Here are a few of their ideas....

"The green apples are more than the yellow and the red."

"The yellow apples are exactly in the middle of the red and the green."

"The red apples have the smallest."

"I know the green apples have the most because they are the tallest."

I love when my class has such great dialouge after a lesson and with little to no prompting by me! We will create another apple graph later in the week where they will color the boxes independently.

1st Surfer of the Week!

I started "Surfer of the Week" in my classroom today. Each student is assigned his/her own special week. I put a picture of the student, their name and any special papers or pictures they bring in on the surfing bulletin board. This student has a special time each day where he/she shares special interests, pictures or anything else important to him/her with the class. The child's parents are also encouraged to come in one day to share something with their child's class. Parent's in the past have read a book, described their job, played a game or made a craft with the class. We are excited to hear all about our first surfer of the week this week and many more to come!

Daily 5 Reading & Math Video

Below is video taken during both my Daily 5 Reading time and my Daily 5 Math time. As you can see, both Daily 5's are based on independent tasks for the students to be working on while I am working with kids. We are now to the point where they can complete four Daily 5 Reading choices and 3 Daily 5 Math choices independently and I am starting to pull strategy groups and one on one conferring with students.

Daily 5 Reading

Daily 5 Math

Down by the Station

This week's poem was called Down by the Station. We completed many activities with the poem this week. One of our favorite activities was using a CAFE strategy that we have been practicing with while reading the poem, Tune in to Interesing Words. While reading the poem, the class "tuned in" to any interesting words.

The poem goes like this:

Down by the station,

Early in the morning.

See the little puffer-bellies

All in a row.

See the engine driver,

Pull the little throttle.

Puff, puff! Toot, Toot!

Off I go.

The intersting words we wrote down were puffer-bellies, throttle and toot, toot! When I asked the students what made these words interesting here is what they had to say.

"The author could have chosen to use the plain word 'train', but instead he used puffer-bellies to make it interesting for us!"

"Toot, toot is an interesting word because it's a sound and it was a word in the poem."

WOW! What great reasons as to why the words they found were indeed interesting words. This is the power of Daily 5 and CAFE in our Kindergarten classroom. We use this type of vocabulary on a daily basis and the students are learning what it means and how to apply them in conversation.

Check In Page

Curious to see what the page I use during Daily 5 check in looks like? Click the link below for the Google Doc to see! Each round of Daily 5, students make a choice as to which choice they want to go. Once all five choices are an option, I will make sure they go to Read to Self at least one of the three rotations. I can also use this page to see what choices they are choosing more than others and will encourage them to choose one they haven't in several days. I love having my check in page all on one week. That way, both my students and I can start fresh every Monday!

Daily 5 Check In

I use pretty much the same format for my Daily 5 Math check in. If it works, why change it?

Daily 5 Math Check In

Substitute Award Winners!

I had a meeting yesterday afternoon and had a substitute teacher in my room. Whenever I have a sub, I ask him/her to write down 2-3 names of students who made good choices, were wonderful helpers and overall stood out in the sub's mind. Below are the three students who she chose yesterday! Way to go!

Listen to Reading

I introduced Listen to Reading yesterday by modeling the procedures and jobs for our fourth Daily 5 choice. Today, we created an I-chart from what we learned yesterday and the choice was open for students to pick. Below are pictures of the job cards and our I-chart, as well as the tape player and students at the choice today. I have four chairs at the listening station and created four jobs, one for each student. Last year, I was able to have one person press play and another in charge of pressing stop/rewind. This year, the cd/tape player is close to only one chair so I had to be creative and think of another job besides pass out books and clean up for the fourth student. I decided to go with the "Card Collector". This person collects the job cards when it is time to clean up and returns them next to my chair to keep for the next rotation.

 

Tune in to Interesting Words!

I introduced a new CAFÉ reading strategy last week, Tune Into Interesting Words. This strategy teaches students to “tune in” when listening or reading a story for any interesting words they might come across. We read the story Where the Wild Things Are and found 8 interesting words when reading the story! A few of the words we found were gnashed, wild, frightened, rumpus and mischief! When we are reading a story and they hear a word that they might find interesting, they are to put their hand up by their ear as a signal to me that they heard an interesting word. Before I continue reading to the next page, those students will share what interesting word they heard!

CAFE Strategy

This week I introduced the CAFE strategy "Use Prior Knowledge to Connect with Text". Before reading the story Peanut Butter and Jelly we used our prior knowledge of our own experiences with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We talked about how we already know a lot about the topic in the story we were about to read. After reading the story we discussed what parts of the story we knew ahead of time and how there were a few parts that we did not know before reading.

CAFE Mini-Lessons

During CAFE today we reviewed beginning sounds and started learning about ending sounds. We wrote the beginning and ending sound for each picture. Students are currently working on beginning sounds in their writing journals. We will continue to practice both beginning and ending sounds whole group during mini-lessons this week and I will model writing with both sounds in our journals next week.




Our new sight word this week is the word "see". We created our own sentences using this word. One student came up with his own sentence using four of our sight words "I can see a _____." I gave a challenge to the whole class this morning to use their sight word cards from their home folder and create sentences using more than one sight word. Included in the challeng was to see if their parents can do the same thing!

First Class Birthday!