Week of January 6, 2020

Our new art gallery paintings

Reader’s Workshop

   This week the children focused on a new word during reader’s workshop. Our word this week was “schema”. This means prior knowledge or to the kindergartners…stuff that we already know. We used our schema to make connections to stories and to work on book discussions.
Independent work during literacy stations has really taken a huge leap since the children came back from the vacation. They are moving between stations more independently and spending time really focused on their learning during this time. This has made meeting with individuals and small groups so much easier.
Next week I will begin the second round of literacy assessments. I am really looking forward to seeing all of the growth the children have made. These assessments will take a couple of weeks to complete for all of the children. I will update and share your child's google slides with you by the beginning of February so that you can also see their growth.

Writer’s Workshop

  This week we started our work on opinion writing. Kindergartners may not know it but they do have a lot of strong opinions. We are learning to give reasons for our opinions by using the word 'because'.

   Journal writing is coming along nicely. The children have moved from just doing pictures, to writing sentences with assistance. Many of the children are writing sentences with very little assistance from adults. This is great!

 Morning Meeting

GREETING: Letter Sound Greeting

ACTIVITY: Gingy, Gingy

Math Lessons

  This week our focus was on addition and subtraction. We spent some more time learning the difference between the sign for addition and the sign for subtraction. Many times children this age just rush ahead and assume that all equations are addition. This is a difficult habit to break but we are working on it.

Muscle Word

want & went
These are often tough sight words for kindergartners. When spelling the word 'want' we say to ourselves "I want an ant" and we remember that the word want starts with a w and ends with ant. :)

Fundations

    Now that we have learned how to form all of the lower case letters, this week we started with the formation of capital letters. This unit will go quickly as we will focus on eight letters a week. This week we worked on A through D.

Saying Goodbye

    Today the children and I said goodbye to our friend Mr. Tanner. The children and I have really enjoyed having Mr. Tanner's help in our classroom for the past few months and today was his last day with us. The children created a really nice book for him telling him all of the things they liked about him, we had ice-cream sandwiches and a dance party at the end of the day.

A Look Ahead

Please note that January 20th there is no school.