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.