Week 5

What a colorful week we've had in kindergarten! Thanks for all of your help in dressing your child appropriately. We are getting so many compliments from other teachers and classes. Here are just some of the many things we accomplished this week.

Monday was red day and we were in our finest.

One of the books we enjoyed reading was Mary Wore Her Red Dress. We filled out a paper that said what red clothing item we wore and also illustrated it to match the pattern in the book.

We also read Who Said Red?

After reading The Little Red Hen and The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza, we compared the two stories using a Venn diagram.

In writing, we are learning to use resources in our room to help us spell. We can use the word wall, the ABC chart, or we can find the word written somewhere in the room. We can also refer back to previous pages in our journals to help us spell. We read the book, Max's Words to help us remember to use the word wall.

Our letter of the week was Mm. We learned this with the help of Marvin the Monkey.

We had fun learning how to draw Marvin the Monkey the next day.

In science, we did a milk explosion experiment. We practiced our skills of following directions, making predictions and recording information accurately in our science journals.

Our focus book was Whose Baby Am I? We learned that there was a pattern to this book and we learned we could look at the pictures to help us figure out the words in the story.

Blue day was also a lot of fun.

We read Blueberries for Sal. We had to count out and draw blueberries to represent a given number.

A funny story was Dear Mr. Blueberry. This was about a girl who wrote letters to her teacher because she thought a whale was living in the pond in her yard. 

Yesterday I Had the Blues was a book about using colors to tell someone's emotions. 

When we got done with our math, we got to go to math work stations.

In science, we practiced mixing primary colors and learned we could make secondary colors. This was a cute activity. The kids really thought they were magic when the colors changed. They had fun mixing all colors together at the end to make black too.

The next day was yellow day. We loved learning the yellow song.

Here are some of our favorite yellow books that we read.  We also enjoyed going to the library on Wednesday. Don't forget to return your books each Wednesday so that you can check out a new one.

We started working on our handwriting. We learned proper pencil grip and posture. The first letter we learned was capital F. We make this with one big line and two little lines.

We began an alphabet notebook. We made a craft that goes in the notebook, highlighted the letter Mm in the poem and wrote a sentence with many Mm's and illustrated it. We will add a new letter to our notebook as we learn them.

In social studies, we began talking about families. Our poem of the week was about families too. It goes to the tune of "Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes", only the words are:

Brother, sister, both or none, both or none.
Brother, sister, both or none, both or none.
Families are different for everyone.
Brother, sister, both or none?

We read The Napping House.

We talked about who lives in our house the the roles each family member plays. We made our own houses and inside we drew members of our family.

Thursday was green day and computer lab day!

We read the book, The Animal about a boy who found an animal. He described the animal to his friends and each one came up with their own idea of what the animal looked like. Mrs. Langham stopped the book before the ending. We each had to predict what the animal looked like in our heads. Ask us what it really was at the end.

We read this book to help us reinforce the letter Mm. Our sight word this week was "we". 

In math, we loved this book. It was a counting book and it was fun finding numbers on each page. After reading, we made and illustrated our own counting books. Mrs. Langham will share them with you at parent conferences in October.

Orange day was on Friday! We also loved going to Hill Harbor on Friday morning.

We read the book, Cat's Colors and we had to guess what cat's favorite color was. Many of us guessed orange, and who wouldn't on orange day.

In math, another assessment of our counting abilities was in an activity called Grab and Count. We grabbed a handful of unifix cubes and had to record how many we were able to grab in one hand.

Don't forget to continue wearing your colors next week too.

Monday 9/30- purple

Tuesday 10/1- pink

Wednesday 10/2- black and white

Thursday 10/3- brown

Friday 10/4- rainbow

Week 4

Here's what's happening in kindergarten this week.

In Writing, we started focusing on organization. We talked about the tools of a writer after we read this book. We liked how this was very similar to the song, "The Lady with the Alligator Purse".

Pigs in the Corner taught us that our writing needed to be organized, or it would turn out to be a big mess. The pigs in this story were not organized when they were square dancing and then ended all tangled up. If we don't write our letters in an order, it makes it difficult for the reader to read.

This book taught us to stop at the end of the page and to return sweep and finish our writing underneath. 

This book taught us that letters represent beginning sounds. The letters in this book chose a present to give to their mothers that all started with the same letter as their name. We have been working on our Name Chant poem this week and we had to find words that start the same as our name too.

Our focus book this week was Jazz Baby. We noticed a pattern in this book. We also noted rhymes too.

We continued reading fairy tales this week. We started off with several versions of Jack and the Beanstalk.

And a new one to us, Kate and the Beanstalk.

We made our own Jack and the Beanstalk out of a clothespin and planted lima beans. We can't wait to take them home. Some of them have just begun to sprout.

We read a few versions of the Three Little Pigs.

Then we read the true story of the three little pigs.

But our favorite was this one!

Little Red Riding Hood is also a great fairy tale.

It was fun to act out the story using puppets.

Once Upon a Time, princesses, princes and Happily Ever After are very common in fairy tales such as Rapunzel.

Here is a silly version of the story. We thought it was funny when Rapunzel could not hear and threw down wrong items to the prince (instead of her hair, she through down her underwear).

We enjoyed the Princess and the Pea.

Another funny princess was in this story.

We have continued working on our phonemic awareness and have enjoyed the letters sounds and motions to this book.

We read the book Hop on Pop to reinforce rhyming words.

In math, we started the question of the day with a yes or no survey. We interpreted the data after recording information.

We continued using the counting jar. We count the objects in a jar, double check our answer and then find ways to record and represent the number.

We had fun sorting, especially sorting our class. After we were sorted, we had to guess the rule for why we were sorted. That was a lot of fun. We learned how to play the attribute train game. We could only change on attribute in our shape train at a time. This game will soon be in our centers to play.

We worked on more problem solving in our math journals. When we got done, we were able to go to our math work stations with our partners.

In science, we continued talking about our five senses. We read a book about taste and talked about parts of the tongue that can taste different things (sweet, sour, bitter and salty). 

As a culminating activity, we got to tastes several things and write about how we used our five senses for each food. This was a very yummy activity.

We read about hearing and learned about the different parts of the ear.

After reading this book, we decided it would be fun to take our own listening walk.

We learned that the sense of touch is not just in our hands, but is a very important sense. It can save us from being hurt. We felt different textures and recorded them.

In social studies, we learned about the Pledge of Allegiance and what the words mean.

We learned some important symbols of our country after reading this alphabet book.

It was Constitution Day and we talked about what the constitution is. We decided to make and sign one in our classroom, just like our forefathers. 

Another important document is the Declaration of Independence. This is also old, like the constitution.

Mrs. Phillips came for a guidance lesson and brought her friends Can Do and Will Do.

We started going to the computer lab this week and learning basic keyboarding. Mrs. Langham will try to remember to take the camera next week. We were very excited to use our headphones and get on the computers.

We have been doing a better job listening and earned center time several days this week. Here are some of our favorite things to do.

We will begin a color unit for the next two weeks. Please wear the following colors on these days:

Monday 9/23- red
Tuesday 9/24- blue
Wednesday 9/25- yellow
Thursday 9/26- green
Friday 9/27- orange
Monday 9/30- purple
Tuesday 10/1- pink
Wednesday 10/2- black and white
Thursday 10/3- brown
Friday 10/4- rainbow