Popcorn Words and Number Sense

This week has been a busy one, with lots of new learning and fun!

Fix It Duck is a hilarious story by Jez Alborough.  We talked about character  and setting this week.  In our journals we wrote about our houses, since the setting of the story happened in Duck's house and then moved to Sheep and Goat's houses.  Check out some of the other Duck stories by Jez Alborough at the library.

Read Around The Room... One of my favorite activities to get the kids up and moving and learning at the same time is "Read Around The Room".  The children get to use clipboards, this makes them feel very official!  This week I had hidden letter tickets all over the room and they had to find them and record them on their sheet.  For an extra challenge they could find letters anywhere in the room (not just on the letter tickets), wow, we sure have a lot of letters in our room!

Numbers to 5 is our math chapter this week.  This activity helps strengthen number sense in children.  They had a cup with 4 beans in it, each bean was white on one side and red on the other.  They had to "shake those beans" and then spill them out onto their work mat.  They graphed the result each time.  Here are some of the different combinations of 4 that occurred.  It is great practice to try activities like this at home and school to  help the children begin to recognize visual clusters of objects, rather than having to count them each time.  (If you want to make your own version of "Shake Those Beans" you can buy a bag of dried lima beans and use a sharpie marker to write a dot or color one side of each bean... work up to more beans!)

Popcorn Words... Popcorn Words are words that "pop up" everywhere. They are high frequency words that are repeated often in books and all print media (check your cereal box, you’re bound to find a popcorn word!).  Kindergarteners need to have meaningful encounters with the words in order to build connections to other words they already know.   Learning these words will help us to become fluent readers and writers. As new words are introduced, they are added to our "Popcorn Word Wall”   We add one or two words per week to our popcorn wall.    Each time we add a word to the wall we take a close look at it.  We notice things such as how many letters it has in it, we cheer it and clap it or move to it.  Once the children are familiar with the words, we then begin making sentences with our popcorn words and our word families.  We also refer to the words when writing in our journals.  Your child is sure to begin seeing these words “pop” up everywhere.  Encourage them to look for them wherever you go!