Week 9

The first nine weeks of school is officially over. Report cards went home today. Please be sure to sign the yellow envelope and return the envelope to school. The report card is yours to keep.

Our letter of the week was Pp. We learned the song Penelope Pig to help us learn this letter. Our sight words were a and as.

We also added to our alphabet notebook by making our letter Pp peacocks.

We began a new writer's workshop this week. Ms. Hazlewood and I applied to a writing program. Twenty teachers were chosen and we were two that were chosen to implement a new writing program to kindergarten. The children begin with a mini-lesson on the floor and then go off to write daily. They have loose paper in binders and I will be conferring with them individually. They are practicing their skills daily and applying what they have learned.

They learned that "when they are done, they've just begun". Authors don't ever stop. They go back and add more detail to the picture, add more words, or start a new piece. We also learned about detailed illustrations and how to add action to our picture after reading this story.

Our focus book of the week was Friends All Around.

A fable that we learned was Brer Turtle Helps Out.

We practiced sounding out words with a making words activity.

We learned another Beanie Baby reading strategy. Stretchy the Snake teaches us to stretch out the words slowly and put them back together to read the words. We also talked about using this strategy in writing to stretch out the sounds in the words and to write the letters down that we hear.

We had fun using Bingo dabbers with our dot it sight words.

This week, we learned about pumpkins. We read about them and made a book about them.

We learned about the pumpkin life cycle.

We visited our own garden and saw a real pumpkin vine with beginning green pumpkins!

Someone was being silly.

We read a couple of books about Halloween.

And we had fun in our pumpkin centers measuring, counting their lines, finding the circumference and predicting whether they would sink or float.

In math, we continued talking about numbers and counting. We enjoyed our counting Bingo game and our counting centers.

Each day in math, we made a page in our Halloween Song counting book.

We had fun singing this song for you that goes along with the book.

In science, we began talking about energy. One form of energy is sound. We read about sound.

We talked about how a sound is a vibration. We felt our vibrating voice boxes and we made lots of sounds with instruments too! We talked about how and low pitched sounds and loud and soft sounds.

We made our own flutes from straws that use vibrations to make sound.

Another form of energy is light. We read about sources of light and sorted items that produced light in our science notebooks.

We also read about a firefly that makes light.

We had fun pretending to be fireflies with our glow sticks.

We were fireflies in the computer lab because it is dark in there. While we were there, I snapped a few shots of them working on their computers.

In social studies, we talked about how technology has changed things. We compared a classroom from long ago to one today with these two books.

We also discussed how homes and jobs are different. Inventions sure have helped make life easier for us.