St. Patrick's Day

Since I knew that we'd be gone during St. Patrick's Day I wanted to incorporate some leprechaun fun into our week before Spring Break.

 

In math we did pots o' gold addition problems. You can easily do your own story problems at home with your child's toys! Encourage them to do both addition and subtraction.

 

 

 

Our Lead21 theme for the past month has been living things. We have talked about how plants and animals grow and change, and how they are alike and different from one another. For this activity students chose an animal or a plant and drew it's life cycle.

Tadpole, Kindergartner, kid, teenager :)

Cactus-- Seed, some spikes, some more spikes, grown up cactus

 One of the table jobs that students did was to label and draw the parts of a flower, and then inside they wrote about what each part did.

Make seeds, carry water, give food, hold flowers in place

 During our writing time we wrote about how we could catch a leprechaun (story sequence), what we would do if we actually caught the leprechaun, and things that made us feel lucky.

I feel lucky when my friend gave me a dollar and some pies!

I feel lucky when my dad brings home a donut.
 

 To wrap up our unit on plants and animals we read the book The Lorax. After reading we discussed the parts of the story (author, setting, characters, problems and solutions).
The students then wrote about what they would do to help the Earth of they were the Lorax. I put these adorable pictures of them with their Lorax mustaches on the bottoms of each piece of writing.
Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

Playing Catch-up!

I'd like to apologize for the no show of posts for a while! I am going to try to get back into Friday posts so that you know what is happening in our classrooms throughout the week.

Math-

This week we did some work with clocks and telling time to the hour. We read The Grouchy Ladybug and watched some Harry's Kindergarten video clips to practice matching our clocks to their time. We also played time memory where the students had to match an analog and digital clock.

I have been adding in some money math games to help with students who are not yet able to identify their coins. We also have a couple of games that work on the value of money and adding money.

Reading-

We have been working on using the beginning, middle, and end of stories to retell a story that we know. When you read a book at home with your child have them practice this skill. They are all really good at the beginning and ending, but need to keep working on that middle piece.

Writing-

Our purpose with writing this week was to use descriptive language to create a picture in our readers mind. We wrote about pineapple all week! On Wednesday I brought in a real pineapple and the students described the outside of the pineapple. On Thursday we tasted fresh pineapple, and on Friday we tasted dried pineapple. The kids all wrote wonderful books that should have come home on Friday.

Science-

We have been learning about animals. This week we discussed animal coverings (fur, hair, skin, scales) and why animals live in different habitats. We focused on pond and forest since those are the habitats most familiar to students in Iowa.

Extra-

Last week we did Dr. Seuss so I have put in a couple of pictures from that day.

The kids made rhyming hats, used goldfish to make patterns and crafts, and we did a lot of reading of Dr. Seuss books throughout the day. It is always one of my favorite days of the year!

With their hats being so tall it was hard to get a picture with everyone's face!

November 9th

Math seems to be the time that I remember to get my camera out the most. I will try to take more pictures of our literacy and writing time, I promise!

We talked about probability this week. We practiced using the terms certain, possible, and impossible. I read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to the students and we discussed things that happened that were possible and impossible. The students then recorded in their journals some possible and impossible things.

The next day we took a deck of cards with just the 2’s through 10’s and the students took turns pulling cards and discussing if the it was certain that the next card would be higher, possible that it would be higher, or impossible for it to be higher. This is a higher order of thinking so I was very impressed with how the students did!

They also took some colored “beans” and shook and dumped them and recorded if they landed all the same color or different colors. This is where we talked about how it was a higher probability that they would be different, however it was possible to all be red or white.

Recording that the beans landed as different colors

 

We did some work with addition and subtraction concepts this week. For majority students this is an introductory skill; however some were ready to start recording number sentences on whiteboards.

The students started with the growing train game. Starting with no cubes they rolled a dice (with just 1, 2, or 3 on it) and they added that many to their train. This helped them understand that when we add we get more.

The next day we played disappearing train game. The students started with 10 cubes and then rolled the dice and subtracted that many from their rain. This showed that when we subtract we take away.

Great addition sentences!

Adding 3 to the train

Starting a subtraction problem

 

 

 

I did manage to snag 2 pictures from our literacy time and writing.

We have been talking about different types of houses so this week students looked through books to find 6 types of homes. They then drew those homes and labeled them. We have also discussed doing our best work so that anyone that looks at our picture can tell what we drew.

 

 

Stick house, Apartment, Igloo, Farm, Houseboat, Clay house

Apartment, igloo, barn, ?, clay house, houseboat

 

In writing we have been talking about Veteran’s Day. We labeled a big picture of a soldier with characteristics of Veterans. The students came up with: fought for our country, brave, care for people, keep us safe, save people.

The next day the students wrote thank you letters to the Veterans for all that they have done. We finished up by making our own soldiers. They turned out wonderful so check them out when you come to conferences next week!

Thank you for your fighting. Thank you fro the fighter planes.
Thank you for (the) Air Force. Soldiers are nice.

Apple Orchard

Walking past all the apple goodies

Listening in the barn

Learning about different farm products

Corn and soybeans

Feeling the wool from the sheep



Where the apples get sorted

One room school house

Learning about the seasons

Tasting sweet and sour apples



 



Corn pit!!

The best I could find for the class picture.
Next time I won't take my picture into the sun. :)

October Wow!

Wow! October was a long and busy month.  I know it is a looooong post but if you make it to the end there will be a treat for you. :)

Math

With our math times I try to incorporate as much hands on as I can. I believe that Kindergarten students learn best by doing, however there is a lot of modeling that happens before they can do on their own!

One thing we are working on is sorting objects in two different ways (shape and then size, or color and then number of sides). We started this activity by going on a leaf hunt. Each child brought a leaf inside and then we discussed ways we could sort the leaves: color, size, number of points, ripped/whole, shape. After this discussion we glued our leaves into color and size sorts.  You can sort at home using silverware, their toys, or their clothes!

 

 

 

During the first trimester we have been working on number identification through 20 and ordering numbers through 20. During one math session the students worked with a partner to put their number cards in order 0-20. Then we worked on number identification multiple ways. I called out a number, asked for a number that was one more or one less, and I clapped a number that they then had to find.  You can work on this at home by finding and reading number in the house, have your child put magnet numbers in order, or give them a number to type into your cell phone.

 

 

The last math activity (that I took a picture of!) was using spiders to measure classroom objects. The students not only worked on measuring, but also on writing their number correctly.

Reading

Our inquiry project for our Lead21 unit (Homes and Families) is comparing how homes are alike and different.

We started by looking through home books and text coding things we thought were a “wow!” or that made us wonder something.

 

In order to answer this question we have also been looking at books that show homes around the world and talking about how they are the same or different from our homes here in Ankeny.

 

Finally (for those of you who made it to the end of this post!) I have uploaded a video of the students reading their Lead21 poem for the week. We practice this poem every day and this was our first time performing for another class. It turns into a bit of a round at the end, but that is probably because we were lined up in front of another class.

Enjoy!