Welcome back! It’s been a bustling week, and the kids are raring to go! It was great to see their shining faces after February vacation, and everyone is settling back nicely into our routines! Our days have been full, and the excitement is high! Here are just a few of our highlights from the week!
Room #7 is closing up our unit on Opinion Witing. To finish this unit, the class is ending it with a bang! The kiddos learned about persuasive writing this week and what it means to “convince” someone of something. We chatted about how to identify a problem, reflect on it, and come up with ideas to persuade others to help fix that problem. The kiddos realized that they do not have to wish their problems away; they can write them away. To really bring this concept home, the kids wrote a persuasive letter in the voice of Pigeon from the Mo Willems book, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! Together, we identified the problem (the bus driver won’t let Pigeon drive the bus), and then brainstormed several reasons Pigeon could use to convince or persuade the bus driver to let him finally drive the bus. The cherubs did such an amazing job with this tricky project. They really thought hard to discover possible persuasive reasons and included them in their letter. Awesome work, boys and girls! Next up: “How-to stories”!
Kindergartners are taking a break from Math stations this week for a new unit entitled Bunk Beds! This unit begins with the story of a PJ party – a sleepover during which eight children play, moving up and down bunk beds, teasing and tricking the babysitter who imagines she is losing and then gaining children.
The unit introduces the arithmetic rack, or rekenrek, as a powerful model and tool, to help act out the story. The rekenrek is a calculating frame consisting of two rows of ten beads with two sets of five in each row. The five-structure of this apparatus supports the development of part-whole relations in early number sense. In this unit, the cherubs move the beads on the rekenrek to illustrate and develop an understanding that eight can be named in many ways, for example 7 + 1 = 5 + 3 = 4 + 4. The kiddos absolutely adored exploring with their very own individual (and smaller!) rekenreks. They did an extraordinary job showing the different combinations to eight and were able to explain adeptly that no matter what combination of numbers one uses, it still equals eight.
At the end of the week, the boys and girls of Room #7 made their very own bunk bed stories choosing a target number that was just right for them. They loved the creativity aspect of this project, obviously enjoying the mingling of Math and English Language Arts! We made another class book! Additionally, as their stories were read, we used the class-size rekenrek to model the changing arrangements. Next week, we will go back to station work, but stay tuned because this unit will continue the following week!
In a workshop this week, we colored in thinking caps from the Mo Willems’ book, Amanda and Her Alligator. Next, students worked independently on writing a sentence that exhibited the following skill: when you change the first letter of a word, you can make it into a new word. Using our –at and –an family knowledge, the kiddos chose what word family they wanted to use and then changed their first –at or –an word into another! Check out our back bulletin board to see their results!
We’re working on syllables together. The children are learning that:
• We can hear and say the syllables in a word.
• We can blend syllables together.
The boys and girls are thinking about the parts of words and how we blend syllables together to make up words. This ability to analyze words into their separate parts will help the children become successful readers.
Moreover, the cherubs are learning to solve new words by making connections to words they already know. In class, we’ve been changing the first letter or letters of a word to form a new word, such as cat to bat. This understanding is helping the children take words apart as they read and spell as they write. Challenge your kiddos to do this at home as well by practicing with the word families we’ve already reviewed in class (-at and-ay). Have some fun with it!
Enjoy your weekend!