Hi everyone! Things around Kindergarten sure have been busy, although I feel it's been hard to get a rhythm with Hurricane Sandy, Halloween and Election Day, etc.! I hope all of you that have family and friends in the NY/NJ area are getting back on their feet. As you probably know, the Jersey shore is near and dear to my heart. I grew up going there every summer for as long as I can remember and my children love spending time there now. I am working on finding a way to connect us with some elementary schools in that area so that we can become pen pals. Hopefully we can send some love their way! Thank you this month to all of our Veterans. We look forward to honoring you this month.
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| This week we read Life in an Ocean. This non-fiction text gave us a nice change and helped us learn some features of non-fiction text such as a table of contents and a glossary of terms. We loved sharing all that we already knew about the ocean and learned a few new things. It was great to practice going back to the text to find our answers. |
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| We used the ocean theme from literacy in math this week as well. Using ten frames we built sets to match numerals, The children "fished" a numeral from a bucket and then represented it with fish on their ten frame. We are now working with the terms "fewer" and "more". An extension of this activity would be to ask them to represent an amount that was fewer than the number they picked. You can try this at home, feel free to keep the ocean theme going and use seashells or goldfish crackers. |
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| Our crabs! The children are so excited to bring these home, but we would like to display them at school for a little longer. The crab page in our Life in an Ocean book was so exciting and they loved creating these crabs out of clay. The modeling clay was much harder to work with than playdoh...what a great chance to work those fine motor muscles! |
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| Our Popcorn Word Wall is getting new words on it each week. These are the words your child should be practicing at home. I have heard many kids shouting with excitement during "quiet" reading time that they "FOUND A POPCORN WORD!!" in their books, this is wonderful, keep the excitement going!! |
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| While we have moved on from alphabet activities to studying one letter each week (focusing on handwriting, and phonics) we are still engaging in activities that practice alphabetical order and require letter naming. This was a super fun team activity at the Orange Table. The kids were singing the alphabet song, working cooperatively and did a great job sorting a full bucket of letters! |
