Sunday, April 28, 2013

Countdown to 1st Grade A-D

It is hard to believe that the year is almost done! 
This group of sweethearts have grown SO much in the past 154 days and we are celebrating with an ABC countdown to First Grade.
 
Our class at the beginning of the year
For A we put things into ABC order. The kids did really wonderfully when they came to students who had the same first letter and really figured out how to go through the letters to decide who went first in our line.



Please excuse the black frame, I was still figuring out
the iPad camera!

It is really hard to get 25 kids to look and smile in the
same direction at the same time, so we gave in and did a
silly picture!
 Day 2 was Bring your favorite book. We spent the day reading everyones favorite books from home. This class absolutely loves reading!
 
Day 3 was Color so everyone wore their favorite colors, a very bright class that day!


Day 4 was 'Do day so everyone wore their craziest hairdo! This picture doesn't do justice to the curls, colors, braids and mohawks we had going on that day. :)

 
Among all of our fun we are getting a lot of learning into our last weeks of Kindergarten. We have been learning about community helpers, and how we should act in our home, school, and city communities.
 
A parent in our school is a firefighter, and she graciously came in and talked to our classes all about their very important job.
 
We also had a visit from Eric Rohmann who taught us all about how to write books. He was very funny and the kids loved his talk!

 
 
To wrap up our unit on community helpers each child researched a community helper of their choice and then wrote a book about them. They then dressed up as their community helper and presented their learning to other classes.













 

Friday, April 5, 2013

No April showers here!

We had a very sunny week in Kindergarten! The weather has finally begun to warm up and I can tell the students are able to run around more at recess so they can focus in the classroom. :)

Reading:
We worked on story maps this week. After reading stories I had the students tell me the setting, characters, beginning/middle/end. We are really working on the big ideas for beginning/middle/end and trying to not get caught up in the little details.

We continued our Inquiry study of community jobs by doing some research. I checked out a lot of books from the library and the students filled in a web with their job, 3 facts that they got from their book, and a picture. Next week we will be making them into picture books!


 
Writing:
We worked on writing poetry this week! We read many different animal poems and discussed how the poets used describing words to tell what the animal looked like and things that it did. The students and I then worked together to write a poem about a cat and one about a shark. Next week we will continue with writing poetry!
 
Math:
We did some more work with story problems this week. The students wrote their own story problems for us to make into a class book.
We have also been working really hard on our coin identification. Students are expected to correctly identify the penny, nickle, dime, and quarter out of order by the end of Kindergarten. If your child can already do this, practice counting up the amount of money in a pile.
 
We also learned a new math game, disappearing train game. In this game each player starts with 10 blocks and then they add more or take away with a special addition/subtraction dice. The person with the first train to "disappear" wins!
 
Science:
We finished up food groups this week with fruits, grains, and oils. Your child should have brought home the food group packet that we've been working through for the past 2 weeks.