Week in Review--Polar Animals and New Year's Resolutions!

Writing:

 

-We began the week by reviewing our writer’s workshop procedures, expectations and jobs. We then continued to review other pieces of writing like what makes our writing easy to read, conventions like meatball spaces, capital/lower case letters and punctuation! After refreshing our minds on what makes us great writers, we talked about how to start our first sentence in our stories by using a good lead. A few of our favorite words to use at the beginning of a story are “One day….At the beginning….First….In the morning”. I modeled my own story about a time I played outside over winter break with my daughter and the class helped me come up with the beginning of my story. I am excited to continue to see the class grow and succeed as young writers.

Math:

-We learned all about comparing groups of objects by using the terms greater than, less than and equal to. We first talked about the words themselves and then used them by comparing the groups with a partner. After a couple days of practicing this, we put it into a station for Math with Someone.

-We also practiced counting on from any given number and counting on ten. For example, we started at the number 7 and counted on from 7 all the way to 17. We will also practice counting on from numbers in the 20’s, 30’s and higher.

















Content (last week):

On our short 2 hour delay , which was also our first day back to school after winter break, we talked about what a New Year's Resolution is and why people make them. We brainstormed a list of ideas that we, as kindergarten students could do to make ourselves better "us's" in the new year. A few of my favorites were to read more books, better behavior and to help out at home!

Reading:

-We had THREE sight words this week-- “will, be, this”.

-The CAFÉ strategy we worked on this week was the strategy.

“Author’s Purpose

An author's purpose is the author's reason for writing. When you ask yourself why an author wrote a specific text, you are asking about the author's purpose. Often author's write to entertain, to inform, or to persuade. Another common reason is to give instructions or to tell readers how to make or do something. Sometimes an author may have more than one purpose.

There are three reasons why author’s write various pieces:

Persuade	Inform	Entertain
-commercials -advertisements -editorials	-textbooks -news articles -nonfiction texts -biographies	-poetry -short stories -novels -picture books

 

How can you help your child with this strategy at home?

 

1.     When looking and reading a book have your child predict what the author’s purpose was for writing the book before even reading it. Then after reading the book, discuss if they changed their mind or if they were correct.

2.     Ask your child what clues they can find within the text that helped them decide their choice.

3.     Go through all of the books on your book shelf that you have read over and over and sort them into the three different possibly choices for author’s purpose.

We worked on our "H" brother sounds this week. Ch, Th, Wh, Sh and Ph are all part of the H brother family! We came up with words and used our puppets to decide which word had which brother!

 

Listening to I Wanna Iguana after learning about Author's Purpose!

Our poem this week was titled "Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar". We tried all week trying to find out who in fact stole the cookies by placing every person in our class's name on the poem. We found out on Friday that Mrs. Brown stole the cookies! Lucky for us, she brought them back and gave each of the students a cookie!




















Content:

This week was all about Polar Animals. We started the week off by learning what several polar animals are, what their babies are called, where they live, what they eat and how and why they hide. We continued the week by studying specifically about penguins and polar bears!































Other:

We had our 2nd nine weeks behavior celebration Thursday morning. Coyote Chris came to our school with several exotic and artic animals. Our favorite was the surprise guest at the end...a real live reindeer!

Week in Review--Gingerbread!

Reading:

-We had TWO sight words this week-- “is, how”.

-The CAFÉ strategy we worked on this week was the strategy.

“Recognize when two words rhyme”

We have been working on word families for a few weeks now and are getting really good at blending the letters and sounds together to make words. We are beginning to discuss that these words in the same family also can be called rhyming words!

How can you help your child with this strategy at home?

1.     When you are reading books, pick out various words and have your child come up with other words to rhyme with it!

2.     While reading your child’s “Roll&Read” talk about the words in the family and how they are rhyming words.

3.     Tell your child to come up with as many words as they can think of in the “-at” word family or the “-op” and so forth. Time them to come up with more and more each time!

4.     Have your child come up with nonsense words that rhyme with real words and create your own definition for the nonsense words!

Writing:

-We practiced fixing sentences this week that did not have a capital at the beginning of the sentence and several capital letters throughout the sentence. We talked about how capitals should only be found at the beginning of the sentence and not throughout it. We will discuss proper nouns when we return from break.

-We also met with our writing partners to practice helping them by not only stretching out unknown words or sight words, but we can also help them remember to add meatball spaces, noodle spaces, capitals and punctuation at the end of sentences! They did a GREAT job helping their partner make their writing easier to read.

Math:

-We reviewed 3D shapes, addition to 5, number writing and ways to break numbers 11-19 into tens and ones.

-I continued report card testing this week. Most of the class is doing an EXCELLENT job on their second nine weeks math skills. I am excited to have report cards sent home!

CONTENT:

We learned and learned as much as we could in room 26 this week! Our theme this week was all about gingerbread books! We read so many books this week! Some of our favorites were several versions of the classic Gingerbread Man story, Gingerbread Girl, Gingerbread Mouse, Gingerbread Baby, Gingerbread Friends and Gingerbread Pirates! We completed puzzles, drawings, connect the dots and went on a gingerbread hunt around the entire school!

OUR CLASSROOM ELF'S SNOWY'S ADVENTURES THIS WEEK!