Dot Day!

Did you wonder why your child had the remnants of a painted dot on their face today? Today was International Dot Day! Every person can make an impact on our world, no matter how young or old. Today was all about making our mark! 

We listened/watched Mrs. Reid read the book The Dot by Peter Reynolds. 

You can listen to it here:

We painted our hands and stamped them on a large classroom dot. (Each class in our school also decorated a large dot to display in the hallway.)

We decorated our own coffee filter dot. We are going to be using these in a video conference with other Kindergarten students at Holsenbeck Elementary later this week! We will be talking with them about how we can make our mark on the world. We talked about different ways 5/6 year olds could make their mark. We talked about helping others and being good friends. We also linked making a mark to how community helpers (teachers, police officers, firefighters) make a mark in our world.

In keeping with the dot theme, in math, we read the book Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews. 

We used black dots to create pictures like they did in the story. 

Finally, we made a small poster that can be displayed each year to show the mark we made on Dot Day in 2014! 

Busy week in K!

In Math this week we finished up our unit on shapes! We love singing our shape songs!

We made 2D shapes with marshmallows and toothpicks! We used our shape vocabulary to tell how many sides and vertices they have! Ask your child what a vertice is and see if they can tell you! :)

We made 3D shapes with playdoh! We used our shape vocabulary to tell what we knew about each shape. (How many faces and vertices they had) Ask your child what a face is on a 3D shape and see if they can tell you! :) I LOVE to hear students using the vocabulary we have learned! During snack one day this week a child had a cube shaped container and another child asked her how many faces and vertices the container had!! 

In Reading, we have worked with rhyming words. We know words that rhyme sound the same at the end of the word! We matched picture cards that rhymed. We also played our SWAT IT game with swatting rhyming words. I would call out a word and they had to SWAT a picture card that rhymed.

We also worked this week on identifying beginning sounds of words using our letters of the week- Jj, Kk, Vv, Ww, Oo. 

We have learned some Word Work options this week! Right now we have mainly been practicing letters. Some who know sights words have started practicing sight words too!

Dry erase boards to write letters/words

Playdoh to make letters/words

Magna doodles to write letters/words

Buttons to build letters/words

Pipe cleaners to build letters/words

We also celebrated Patriot Day which is September 11th. We read the book:
 
We discussed what happened on September 11th. Mr. Wingfield talked about it on the morning announcements and read a special message. We talked about all of the community helpers that responded that day- firefighters and police officers. We made patriotic flag-inspired hearts and wrote thank you notes to firefighters on the back.