Kinderland: 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.