Mar. 12-16

We had a wacky week for W week!  We read fun stories like Mrs. Wishy Washy and Wacky Wednesday.  We made a Wacky Week book and retold the Wish Washy story with the animal characters.  We read the story Where the Wild Things Are and practiced our retelling skills.  Whales were our non fiction animal this week.  We created wonderful fact pages and decorated them with different kinds of whales.  they are hanging on our bulletin board.  The students are showing great writing skills!

Our citizenship cool tool for the week is "be honest!"  We read stories and discussed how showing honesty is showing respect for yourself and others. 

We have been practicing counting by 2's.  We are focusing on what makes a number even or odd.  One activity had the kids count out an even number of counters and divide them equally on a paper.  We ended with writing a number sentence.  We learned the game Top It!  This games helps the kids identify numbers...especially tricky teens... and recognize greater or lesser numbers.  Another activity had the kids comparing counters side by side to see which amount was greater or lesser.  We also created number stories to manipulate the counters.  Our week ended with some extended response practice.

Remember that next week there is no school on Tuesday, March 20.  There IS school on Friday but it is a half day ending at 12:05.  Don't forget to stop by the Fun Fair and Book Fair tomorrow at 11:00!  Have a great week!

March 5 - 9

We did a lot of writing this week in kindergarten!   We are inspired by our classmates to make creative books in Writer's Workshop!  We have so many great products, we haven't been able to share them all!  We also responded to various books for "O" week.  We focused on TTQA, which means turn that question around.  We are recycling words found in the question to use in our answer.  This helps us write a complete thought.  We are focusing on conventions like using a capital letter at the beginning with the remainder in lower case, spacing, neatness, and punctuation.  The fiction books we read were Do Not Open and Otto is Different.  We learned about octopuses by reading a few non fiction books and watching video clips.

We read about and explored the dime.  We learned about different three dimensional shapes.  We also read about and discussed the different ways to measure time: by using clocks, noticing where the sun or moon is in the sky, realizing what step we are in with a series of sequential events, and discussing what time of day certain events usually take place. 

Thank you to Mrs. Boiciuc, Mrs. Antti, and Mrs. Marron for running this week's Literacy Centers.  Be sure to check out the Book Fair next week and during the Fun Fair which is Saturday, March 17th.  One of the events is a raffle for activities with teachers.  My donation is Pizza with Mrs. Peterson- a pizza lunch with the winner and two friends during kindergarten lunch.  Maybe YOU will win!

Have a great weekend!

Feb. 27-Mar. 2

We went batty in kindergarten! Bats were the animals we read and wrote about this week in honor of B week.  We also listened to the fictional story called Stellaluna.  Adjectives and adverbs were the focus of our pattern poem we wrote about bugs.  We also enjoyed a funny poem by Shel Silverstein called "Band-aids."  We made a neat class book!  I am truly excited about the effort the students are making in their writing.  We are concentrating on using upper case letters properly, remembering to use punctuation, spelling sight words correctly, and using spacing between our words.  We completed the kindergarten sight word list this week with the word "for."  We will begin to introduce first grade sight words shortly.

In math we practiced probability with colored bears.  Addition was reinforced with dice and a bug board.  It was fun to experience the new data projector in our classroom.  We will use it a lot!  We sequenced daily events using ordinal numbers to label the steps.  A caterpillar coin game helped us to recognize the different coins.

"In like a lion, out like a lamb!"  That's how the saying goes.  We read a story that explains the saying, predicted how our March will end (15 said lamb, 4 said lion,) and made fun lions and lambs for our bulletin board.  We will track the lion and lamb weather throughout March!

Our cool tool this week was:  Do your personal best.  We discussed the importance of putting forth your best effort in all that you do.  We also talked about appreciating who you are and your own abilities.

Please notice the new link under author studies.  Mo Willems has a sight called Pigeon Presents.  Thank you to Mrs. Marron, Mrs. Antti, Mrs. Husseini, and Mrs. Narayanappa for leading Literacy Centers.  Thank you to Mr. Nicklavose for popping the popcorn for popcorn day!

Have a great long weekend!