Week 13

This weather has been crazy this week! We had beautiful weather in the 80's and then nearly freezing temperatures and pouring down rain the next day. That's Texas weather for you. I hope that you have a nice weekend and have plans to stay indoors.

This week, our focus book was Duck on a Bike. We looked at characters, setting and plot.

Some of my former students came back to read to our class.

We added a turkey poem to our poetry notebooks.

We reviewed our letters and sight words this week. We learned two new reading strategies. Lips the Fish tells us to get our lips ready and say the first sound in the word we are trying to read.

Chunky Monkey teaches us to break the word down and look for chunks in the bigger words.

In math, we began a unit on measuring. We read this book to introduce us to measuring and standard units of measurement.

We practiced our skills measuring with unifix cubes.

In science, we continued learning about objects in the sky. We started by reading about the sun.

Zoey was our sun and we talked about what makes day and night by using the globe as a reference.

We read a fun book about the moon.

Then we read some non-fiction books and wrote down facts that we learned about the moon.

We painted moons using glue to make craters and then we water-colored them. 

We wrote our facts down underneath the paintings. These are up on the bulletin board outside my room.

We simulated how craters are made by dropping ping pong balls into flour.

We read a book about what it would be like to go to the moon.

We talked about phases of the moon and read this book that showed many of them.

Then we made moon phases using Oreos. This was so much fun!

We finished up our week by learning about the stars. We also learned that shooting stars are not stars at all, but pieces of rock or iron that burn up in the atmosphere. 

We've had a bit of difficulty with tattling. We read this book and talked about the difference between telling and reporting. Also, Mrs. Phillips talked about Kelso's choices and big/little problems during her counseling visit.

In social studies, we began talking about the Pilgrims.

We learned what it was like to live long ago.

We made Pilgrim and Native American hats.

And we wore them to lunch on Thursday when they served the Thanksgiving lunch in the cafeteria.

We learned the story of the First Thanksgiving and made bracelets. Each color represents something from the story that we learned. Ask me to tell the story back to you.

We read some fun Thanksgiving books.

Due to the rain, we missed Hill Harbor and recess on Friday, so we ended our week with a game and craft afternoon. We had fun learning new games and creating crafts.

Week 12

I hope you enjoyed your Veteran's Day holiday. We had a shorter but busy week again.

Our letter of the week was the letter Ii. We learned it with the help of Isabella Inchworm. Our sight words this week were "get" and "go". Please make sure you are working at home with your child on our sight words. It is great to put them on index cards and review them from time to time.

We worked on a web this week in writing. We put the letter Ii in the middle of the web and drew pictures of four things that started with the letter Ii. We turned each item we drew into a sentence and are in the process of turning each sentence into a page in a book that we are making.

Our unit this week focuses on transportation. We read this book and learned about how different people around the world get from place to place. We examined this non-fiction book and the characteristics that it has. We loved the real pictures in this book.

Retelling and comprehension are important skills in kindergarten. Each week we work on these with our story cards. Here is the story of the two frogs. It is a folktale from Japan.

We learned the "an" word family too.

We tried a new system in literacy centers this week. After our morning lesson, we have a "have to" center that is done at our table. Then we rotate to our Daily 5 choices. Right now, we are only doing four (reading, writing, listening and word work).

In math, we reviewed our numbers from 6-10 and represented them in many ways. We were introduced to tiles for the first time. We will be doing many activities with these tiles to improve number sense. We played a game called show me. Mrs. Langham would ask us questions and we had to show her the answer with tiles. For example, I asked them how many legs on an octopus and they would have to hold up the 8 tile.

You will get a kick out of this answer. The question was: How old is your mom?

In science, we began learning about objects in the sky. We focused on clouds this week. We read this book and retold it with a flannel board. 

Then we made our own cloud pictures with cotton balls and wrote what we think they looked like.

We read a non-fiction book about clouds.

Then we made our own cloud by combining hot and cold air.

We learned about the water cycle and when the water gets heavy, it falls back to the Earth as rain or snow. We simulated this with our shaving cream cloud and food coloring. We had fun adding many colors and watching what happened.

In social studies, we began learning about Native Americans. They were the first Americans.

We looked at many different tribes and learned about how life was much different long ago. We made tepees.

We made totem poles.

We learned about the importance of the buffalo to the Native Americans. We also got to feel real buffalo fur.

We learned about symbols and we tanned buffalo hide (or pretended to with our brown paper bags). They had a lot of fun making the bag soft by crumpling it up many times. The more the crumpled, the softer it got. They also drew symbols on their hides.

We made canoes too.

Next week, we will meet the Pilgrims.

I am going to keep the November Scholastic book order open through the weekend. I only had two orders, so if you would like to purchase books, you may do so online. They make great gifts and I am happy to hold them for the holiday if needed.