Exploring With Morning Work!

For our morning work every day, each table gets a blue tub of  manipulatives. The students job is to explore using these manipulatives in various ways. Some create patterns, pictures, buildings and much more! Just one way of adding in a little "play" into our day!

Shape Drawing

We introduced a new activity for "Math with Someone" today. We have begun learning about the 3D shapes cone, sphere, cube and cylinder. The students take a baggie with various 3D shapes and build something with them. After they build their picture, they draw what they built on their paper. They love being able to use their imagination to build with the shapes and then illustrate their work too!

Writing Beginning & Ending Sounds

We have been practicing writing sentences with sight words and the beginning and ending sounds of words we do not know how to spell. Today for our morning message, we wrote two "We can ___." sentences where we had to fill in the blanks for the missing sight words, plus the missing word we did not know how to spell. We stretched the word out and wrote down the sounds we heard at the beginning and the end of the word.

Our two sentences were:

 

"We can rn" (run)

"We can sp" (skip)

 

Number Swat It!

Today during one of our mini-lessons for math we practice number recognition with a game called "Swat It". Students went head to head to be the first to find a given number. Whoever found and "swatted" the number first stayed up front to face another student. The class loved practicing their numbers with a little friendly competition =).

First Field Trip!

We went on our first field trip of the year to Exploration Acres. We played in a pile of hay, shot corn out of a corn cannon, raced rubber duckies in water, hiked through corn mazes, took a hay ride and picked our very own pumpkins off of the vine! What a day....we can't wait for our next trip!

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Name Practice

In order to keep students engaged and to use various tools when writing, the students practiced writing the letters in their names using water colors. They were able to use as many colors as they wanted for each of the letters in their name. The only requirement was that the first letter was of course capitalized and they wrote the letters using the correct formation we have practiced in class. They turned out GREAT! =)

Daily 5 Up & Moving!

We have worked our way through introducing all of the choices during Daily 5 time and are practicing our stamina with each choice. One of the favorites for the class is "Read to Someone". This is when they get a chance to sit and read books in their book boxes with a friend in class. They have practiced sitting "EEKK" with each other. EEKK means  to sit "elbow elbow knee knee". This way of sitting encourages the students to sit and share the books easily and without much disruption. Now that all of the choices have been introduced are up and running, it is time to get started on conferring one on one and working with strategy groups!

D5 Math!

We've started working on Daily 5 Math! D5 Math is very similar to the reading/writing Daily 5 format. The students will choose between "Math by Myself, Math with Someone and Number Work". We introduce each choice the same way using an I-Chart and having students model and practice what is expected of them within each choice. Below are two options during Number Work. The first picture is using Play-Doh to make/create numbers and the second is tracing numbers, shapes and so forth using mini-cars on a road shaped in that number.

Listen 2 Reading

We have started our fourth choice during Daily 5/CAFE time. Listen to reading is one of the students favorite choices. Each student has a job when they go to this station. They are either in charge of pressing play/stop/rewind, passing and holding the books, cleaning up or collecting the job cards. Having a job for each student is helpful in keeping the station organized and going smoothly without needing help from the teacher. The same book will be available for two days in a row before it is changed. This is to ensure any student who wanted to listen to the story has a chance before it is swapped for another one!

CAFE/D5 is moving along!

Our CAFE board is growing! We have introduced and are working on four different strategies. We started with "3 Ways to Read a Book" which are read the pictures, read the words and retell the story. We then moved on to retell a familiar story, use pictures to tell a story and are not working on check for understanding. Once a strategy is introduced, we continue to practice these strategies all year long.


After introducing a piece of Daily 5 we practice building our stamina. When Read to Self is first introduced the class has stamina of usually less than a minute. We chart our stamina after each round to see how much we have grown. Below is a recent chart and as you can see the class is doing a wonderful job of doing their job during Daily 5, so the teacher can do her job working with kids.



Our latest Daily 5 activity that has been introduced is "Word Work". The students LOVE this choice because they tend to not realize they are learning while working with letters and words. Some of the options they can choose are magnetic letter pans, play-doh, magna-doodles, wikki stix and much more. Before a choice is open to be used in the word work station, it is demonstrated and practiced by the students as a group.

Writing

The class has been working on both writing workshop, writing letters of the alphabet, sentences and responding to reading/stories during "Work on Writing" for Daily 5. In kindergarten, writing phonetically is encouraged. The kids use the sounds they hear in words and write them down, with the exception of sight words which should be spelled correctly. The class is off to a great start with their writing and will continue to improve as their letter sounds and knowledge of words and practice with reading improve!

Poem 8/24!

Each week we have a poem that is introduced on Monday and practiced throughout the week both at school and home. At the end of the week, we have a chance to perform the poem in front of the class and cut/glue/illustrate the poem in our poetry journals. By the end of the year we will have an entire journal filled with every poem!

Read 2 Self

Throughout the past two weeks, the students have been practicing building their stamina with both reading and writing. We start off by first practicing the Daily 5 choice, Read to Self. As a class we hope to stay in our places, following the I-Chart expectations that we created together and see how long we can go without having to stop and return to group. Our entire school has been practicing building their stamina and this past week we had a stamina challenge to see which class was able to have the most stamina during Read to Self.

I-Charts...Read 2 Self & Work on Writing

When first beginning to introduce Daily 5, we create what is called an I-Chart together as a class. The chart has two sections to it. A section for what is expected of the students during that choice and what is expected of the teacher. After discussing and modeling several good and poor choices within the Daily 5 category being introduced, we complete the chart as a class. We hang these charts up in the classroom to refer back to throughout the year!

Shapes!

The class used GEO boards to practice creating 2D shapes using a rubberband. They created many different sizes of squares, rectangles, triangles, hexagons and even created a few shapes on their own! This activity will eventually be placed in our "Math by Myself" station during Daily 5 Math.

Sorting by Color

Today the class practiced one of our first nine weeks report skills, "sorting objects by color". Each table received a tub of math manipulatives and they worked as a group to sort them according to color. We will continue to work on the sorting skill with not only grouping into color, but shape, size and many other attributes throughout the year!

First Day!

Today was our first day of kindergarten! We put our things away, found our mailboxes and hooks, listened to stories, started Daily 5 "3 Ways to Read a Book" and explored with our math manipulative tubs! We had such a fun day meeting our new friends and getting to know our school!


Mrs. Brown's Kindergarten Class 2012-2013!


Making silly faces and being goofy!

Ready To Go!

Room 26 is ready to be filled with 24 five and six year olds! Bring on the reading, writing, math, science, social studies and much, much more!!! It's going to be an exciting year! :)