Week of January 13, 2020

Our muscle word wall as of January 2020!

Reader’s Workshop

   We continued our discussion about using schema while reading this week. The children are becoming quite skilled at making predictions about stories by using their schema. We also started to talk about connections to books. At this point, we are working on text-to-self connections as that is the easiest type of connection for young children to make. The children are thinking about parts of books and telling what it makes them think about in their own life.

Writer’s Workshop

     Our opinion writing is coming along nicely. The kindergartners certainly enjoy sharing their opinion with everyone. They have become quite skilled at using the word ‘because’ and giving at least two reasons for their opinion. I have posted a few photos of some of the writing the children have done.

Fundations

This week we continued our work on the formation of capital letters. We have learned the formation of the letters from A through G so far.

Reading & Math Assessments

     This week a lot of our reading time was taken up with literacy assessments. Even though next week is a short week with no school on Monday and I will be at a conference on Tuesday, my plan is to start the kids back into their reading groups on Wednesday. I was pleased with all of the progress the children have made and plan to update their video portfolios and re-share them with their families by mid February. Math assessments will be completed in February so I plan to do all of the updates at the same time. Thank you for your patience.

Morning Meeting

GREETING: Popsicle stick name greeting

ACTIVITY: Sparkle (a spelling game)

Math Lessons

  Our focus this week was combinations to 10. The children are becoming quite skilled at their fact fluency. That means that for many of them they no longer need to count on their fingers to know that 2+3 equals 5. That is fantastic. Once children have fact fluency to 5 and 10, they are often able to make connections to other equations without feeling the need to use their fingers such as; if 5 + 5 = 10 then I know that 5 + 4 = 9 because it is one less.  Addition and subtraction equations is something all of the children could be working on at home as homework.

Theme Time

  Our theme time focus has been on the water cycle with two main questions... "Where do puddles come from?" and "Where do they go?" We started with a discussion with the children and heard some great thoughts about where the puddle might go. In order to demonstrate that plants may be part of the answer to where puddles go, we did an experiment with a celery stalk. We placed the stalk in a vase with colored water. The children were amazed that the water in the container went down and that the leaves at the top of the celery changed to the color of the water. We will continue with our discussion on the water cycle over the next few weeks.