Mystery Reader

We had our first mystery reader this week! Camryn's GiGi came to read her favorite book- The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. 

She brought 3 surprises with her!! 

1. She made caterpillars for each child!

2. She brought an apple snack! 

3. She created a paper for us to draw/write on! 

We loved having her visit and read to us! Thank you GiGi!!

Apples and leaves, oh my!

This week we had an apple/leaf theme and did a lot of activities in relation to Fall. September 26th was Johnny Appleseed's birthday! 

We started our week in science off reading some books about the 4 seasons. We sequenced the seasons and created 
"A Tree Through the Seasons."

We painted Fall leaves.

We did leaf rubbings.

We used magnifying glasses to explore leaves.

We also completed an apple investigation using apples we brought to school. 

In Writing, we focused on sounding out words by labeling. We listen for the beginning sound, the middle sounds, and the ending sound. In Kindergarten, students spell phonetically. The black writing is what they heard when we "stretched" the words out slowly. 

We labeled a Fall picture together, then students drew their own Fall pictures to label.

We labeled the parts of an apple together "stretching" out the words. Then I covered the chart up and they had to return to their seats and work to sound the words out by theirself. 

We also worked on writing sentences using spaces between words. We wrote about what we like to do in the Fall! 

In Reading, we worked on using pictures to tell a connected story and discussed how pictures are just as important as words. We talked about the similarities and differences of pictures in fiction and non-fiction books. We read When The Leaf Blew In and used the pictures to tell the beginning, middle, and end. 

We read There Was An Old lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves and used pictures to tell the story. 

We practiced segmenting words into syllables (word parts). We learned that there are several ways to find out how many syllables a word had. We can clap the word, say the word like a robot, or put our fingers beneath our chins and see how many times our chin drops when we say a word.

We brought in stuffed animals and favorite toys to practice segmenting. 

Here is an example of segmenting a word by clapping!

We practiced out poem of the week. We found the sight word- it, practiced tracking words- pointing to each word as we read it. 

Watch and listen to one of the students read the poem to us all by herself! 

In math, we worked with our apples we brought in. I asked the students how we could sort our apples and they said by color. I had them see if they could figure out how to do that by working together. I did not give any other direction than that. It was so interesting to here them talk it through. I heard things like "I don't think this apple should go here because it has yellow on it, we should put it in this group." Here is how they sorted the apples:

We then created a graph to show what we sorted. Once we graphed our apples we counted them. I asked students to look at our graph and asked them what they saw. One said read had more and green had less so we wrote those words. 

We read Ten Apples on Top and chose a number to count apples to. After we counted the apples we wrote the numbers on the apples to match what we counted. 

On Friday, we celebrated Johnny Appleseed's birthday! We made crockpot applesauce!

The recipe called for 9 apples, 1 cup of water, 1/2 cup of sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, and I added a little lemon juice. 

It was delicious! 

We read a book about Johnny Appleseed and used pictures to tell the story. We learned his name was really John Chapman and he planted apple trees. 

We also made a pot hat for our head like Johnny!

Happy Fall!! :)

KinderLand in Action!

This week in math we looked at and practiced the number 6 (Make a “C” and then in you go, Now you’ve made a 6 you know!) We began our counting with friends unit. 

We practiced counting squares in counting bags with a partner. We discussed the best ways to count. We found out it makes it easier to count if we organize our objects as we count them. We also learned it is important to go back and check ourselves! We had our first story problem of the week on Friday! We were great Mathematicians!  Our problem was: Austin has 3 pieces of candy. Logan gave him 1 more. How many pieces of candy does Austin have now?  We choose a few friends to share with us the strategy they used to solve the problem. 

We also started new math tubs this week!

Making numbers with playdoh.

Playing memory- matching numerals to amounts.

Tracing numbers.

 

Counting jars- We each have our own counting jar. We count how many objects there are, write down the number we counted, and show that number on our paper.

Counting dots: Students choose a number and count out that many cubes.

 

Roll, count, trace: Students roll a dice, count how may dots the dice landed on, and trace the corresponding numeral.

 

Counting dots on 10 frames and matching numerals.

 

Pattern block puzzles.

In Daily 5 Reading time, we continued practicing identifying beginning sounds with our letters of the week (Qq, Uu, Zz, and Yy) We practiced rhyming words and identifying words that rhymed. We learned the CAFÉ strategy of identifying characters and setting in stories. We read: The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Chester Raccoon and the Big Bad Bully, and Corduroy.  

In Writing, we finished up our narrative books. We chose a story that was from our heart to write about. Mrs. Edwards will be sharing them at conferences in October! 

In Science, we looked at the physical properties of objects. We looked at what things are made of- paper, wood, plastic, metal. We did an experiment with objects to see if they sink or float. We learned to make a hypothesis and test it!