Thursday, October 13, 2011

The First 6 Weeks of School.... Are Done!


Yet another amazing week (with record breaking temperatures!) has come and gone. Many of our jobs this week focused around Halloween and pumpkin themed stories and of course Big Pumpkin. We made a great text-text connection between One Witch and Big Pumpkin when we discovered that they were both illustrated by S.D. Schindler! Here is a quick recap of our week together.
A behind the scenes look at picture day!
Math:
During math I continued working one-on-one with your children while I assessed them on their mathematical knowledge and number sense. The estimation jar this week was filled with plastic rats (next week will be spiders!) and the children tried so hard to make a reasonable estimation without opening the jar. We will open it tomorrow and the children will use cubes, pictures, counting on, counting up or other strategies to determine how close or far they were from the actual amount.
We integrated math with literacy while reading One Witch a counting story about a witch who is making a stew. The children illustrated their own One Witch books (they are very similar to the Ano's Counting Books that the children worked on in September) and calculated how many characters were invited to the party (55!).

Reader's Workshop:
We read The Legend of Spookly the Square Pumpkin a cute little story about being different and being accepted. After reading the story, children drew their individual Spookly pumpkins and wrote about its shape, color and how it was feeling. They also made their own Spookly pumpkins which are on display in our classroom.
We had a shared reading of the big book version of Yuk Soup. Prior to the reading I covered up all of the main words and the children and I discussed different methods of "reading" a word beyond sounding it out. The class used the pictures, the pattern of the text and sometimes the first letter of the word to determine what it was. I think they were all a little surprised to be able to read a book without even seeing all of the words! As a follow up to the reading the children are making their own Yuk Soup  book that you can see after our performance of Big Pumpkin.

Global Buddies:
We joined our Global Buddies in their classroom this week and researched Heifer International. The stories we have read (Give A Goat and Beatrice's Goat) were both based upon a gift from Heifer International. During our time together the children began trying to find out where the animals were sent, how much they cost and what animals were available. Next week the groups will share their findings and we will use our world map to categorize our findings.



 Birthday Celebrations:
This week we had our first Kindergarten birthday celebration for V.V's birthday. To celebrate birthdays in our class, each child is invited to sit in the middle of the rug while their friends gather around them on the perimeter of the rug. Each child is asked to share something they love or find special about their birthday friend. After each child has shared, the birthday friend shares what is special about him/herself. After the appreciation feast we then enjoy a special birthday snack. This week we were treated to mini banana muffins and grapes, a perfect birthday treat!


No comments:

Post a Comment