A Busy Week in Kindergarten

What a week it has been! The children continued their apple study this week with measuring the height of our apples, singing an apple song with Lauren, using watercolors to paint an apple growing from a branch, comparing apples, hypothesizing on why apples were only growing on the top of one of our apple trees and brainstorming all of the things we can do with apples!

During Writer's Workshop the children continued to gain independence in stretching out their words and using a 2 finger space between each word. We finished our review on the leapfrog letters (F,E,D,P,R & B) and began our review on starting corner letters (H, K, N, & M). The focus of our handwriting has been bumping the lines and starting the letters at the top. If your child is writing at home please encourage them (or ask them to show you how) to properly form these letters.

In Math this week we began exploring the calendar and figuring out how to count the days we have been in school. The children suggested that we use the snack sign up calendar and our sign in sheets to tally our days in school so that is what we did. After determining that we had been in school for 15 days we explored all of the different ways to count to 15 (skip counting by 2's, 3's and 5's) and represent 15 (tallies, 15, buildings of 15 things) .

We also continued to solve word problems in our math notebooks. This week the children all worked on a subtraction word problem. Below you can see video's of the different methods students use to solve the same problem. SH chose to use his mental math, AH used blocks and JL used a picture. After solving the problem they explained their method to their classmates.

SH Pumpkin Problem from Lisa J on Vimeo.

JL Solving an Apple Problem from Lisa J on Vimeo.

AH Solves An Apple Problem from Lisa J on Vimeo.

In Book Buddies this week our second grade Book Buddies taught us how to play the math game "Poison Apple". After playing a few rounds we had some time to read our favorite books. This week I was also able to read with each of your children to determine which books would be "Just Right" for them. Everyone was very excited to read and I am looking forward to teaching them new strategies and making them their book baggies..