November 9-13

Wow! Was it a crazy week! The students did so great with welcoming back with open arms! They have been so nice and well behaved. 

This week, for read aloud, we read "Wemberly Worried". We practiced predicting, retelling the important parts of our story, studying our main character, connecting to our main character, answering comprehension questions, and telling our favorite part. 

Our poem was called "Out in the Garden". We made movements to our poem, practiced our movements, wrote words that rhyme with rake, and found vowels in our poem. 

Our big book was "Not Quite Right". We enjoyed trying to guess why Carly's playhouse was just not quite right yet. (she was missing her friends). 

For community writing, we thought of ways to make our worries go away just like Wemberly did in "Wemberly Worried". 

For writing, we finished up our writing unit and had an authors celebration where we shared 1 writing piece with the whole class. We have worked so hard on writing. We learned how to tell a true story, what details to add, how to write sentences, and how to edit our writing to get it ready to share. 

For handwriting, we practiced lowercase O and S. 

Our new word wall word was "is". "Is" is a tricky word wall word because it sounds like there should be a Z at the end but it is an S. 

In math we have been practicing counting by 2's. We have also been practicing writing equations. 

Red Squirrel vs. Gray Squirrel

 

Yesterday, we went outside into Thorson's outdoor classroom with Miss Rachel. We broke into 2 groups and pretended we were squirrels hiding our nuts for the winter! One group was red squirrels and they hid their nuts in one spot. The other group was gray squirrels and they hid their nuts all over. We found out that it is hard to find the nuts you have hidden if you are a gray squirrel because you may have forgotten where you put them. If you are a red squirrel, your whole stash of nuts could be taken all at once. Being a squirrel in wintertime is hard work! 

Fun Fall Week!

We had so much fun this week while learning a lot!     Since there were snowflakes last Sunday, we decided to play in our own snow (writing sight words, numbers, and tallies in shaving cream).  We learned about spiders and made some fun hats!  And just in case your child didn't tell you... one fact we learned was that girls spiders eat boy spiders :).  We also had fun with pumpkins this week!  Students did an awesome job painting their own pumpkins!

In Literacy, we focused on the book Spookley the Square Pumpkin.  We made predictions, discussed Spookley's character traits, and discussed the problem and solution of this story as well as other ways the problem could have been solved.   We learned the sight words "in" and "at" as well as finished learning all the letters in the alphabet, which is why their yellow phonics notebooks came home.  When Mrs. Kuck comes back the focus will be on word families.  

In writing, we have been so busy!  We have been learning how to form uppercase letters.  We have been learning to write sentences with a capital letter at the beginning, finger spaces between each word, and a punctuation mark at the end.  We have learned that pages have more that one sentence and that stories need to have an ending to them.  This week we will be going through our writing binders and I can't wait for your child to bring home his/her work to share with you!  What they have learned how to do in just 38 days of school has been AMAZING!

In math, the kids were SO excited to use candy corn as manipulatives!  We had fun making patterns, sorting, graphing and tallying our candy corn.  We also used candy corn when playing math bingo.  We continued to work on these skills with our math curriculum as well as continued to work with ten-frames and comparing numbers using greater than, less than, and equal to. 

I want to send a BIG THANK YOU to all the families that we able to send items in to help make this past week so much fun for the kids!!!  

At the end of the day on Friday we were able to have a Google Meet meeting with Mrs. Kuck and baby Luna.  We all danced to a song then modeled our costumes for Mrs. Kuck while also showing her the pumpkins each child painted.  

I hope these meetings we have had with Mrs. Kuck will have helped each and every student with the transition when she comes back!  Mrs. Kuck will back on Monday, November 9th and I can't stop telling her what an ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL class she has!!!  It has truly been a joy to have worked with you and your child this first quarter of kindergarten, even in such a difficult time!  Thank you for your patience as we began the school year with so many uncertainties and for trusting me with your child!