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!
Math stations over the next few weeks will center mostly on addition and subtraction! The boys and girls are cementing their knowledge of these two tricky operations! Additionally, our Math stations for the past two weeks have focused on the concepts of more and less, how many more, and we’ve been practicing the skill of changing numbers (e.g., how many do you have to add to go from 5 to 8?).
- Towers, Towers, Towers – This activity provides an opportunity for the children to see number relationships while they practice counting. Given prepared towers, students figured out how many cubes were in each tower by using invisible buddy lines and the knowledge they already had. For example, if they knew that one tower had ten cubes in it, they could then figure out that the other one that had one less cube had a total of nine! Room #7 is full of math detectives!
- Addition Crossout – With a partner, a cherub rolled two dice. He/she then added those two dice together (counting on!) and crossed out that particular number on his/her sheet. The partners went back and forth until all the numbers were crossed out. The partner who crossed out the final number won!
- Which is Longer? – Working with a variety of materials, kiddos compared them to see which was longer. They had to really focus to make certain everything lined up so that their answers were accurate!
- Fix-it Strips – At this center, students encountered a new and tricky concept of “changing numbers”. Independently, the kiddos received a fix-it strip. Using cubes, they built a tower that represented their first number. Next, they changed that tower to match the second number. I asked them to articulate what they did by telling me if they added or took away cubes and how many. The pictorial representations really enabled the students to visualize what they had to do. I was super impressed with how quickly the students caught onto this skill!
- Humpty Dumpty (egg station) – The week before vacation, our mathematicians had a blast participating in another Launch the Learning, or open-ended activity, that drives the students to ask a particular math question. At This LtL, the boys and girls watched a short video clip of a young girl opening the fridge and the eggs falling out. The big question was: How many eggs broke and how many did not? They then spent time coming up with as many different ways as they could to represent how many eggs they thought broke and how many did not. To connect to this launch, they participated in a similar station. Each kiddo worked with his/her own number and then came up with several examples. For instance, if he/she were working with the number 8, he/she showed various ways (picture, words, and numbers) the eggs could have broken: 4 broke, 4 did not, 8-4=4, 4+4=8, etc. So much fun! And, what a challenge!
- ipad – Subitize Tree – A new, engaging, and fun game! The students were reintroduced this week to the word, subitize! Subitize means that one immediately knows how many items lie within a visual scene. For example, when one rolls a die and it lands on six, one would not need to count each individual dot, he/she recognizes that it’s the number six right away. At this game, the kiddos picked a number range to work with, and quickly, an image appeared. They then needed to click a number that accurately represented the image they saw. This was a terrific game for subitizing practice, and the boys and girls were able to make the game trickier as they continued to play! Definitely a fan-favorite!
This week, in one of our whole group Math times, the cherubs of Room #7 learned about the subtraction sign and what it means! We first read The Duckling Wants a Cookie by Mo Willems and used the cookie jar to make subtraction number sentences. Everyone had a lot of fun with this activity – something we will definitely do again! Our mathematicians will practice this skill next week during stations!
Have you ever heard the expression: “March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb!” (Let’s hope!). Room #7 students talked about this expression and then created a corresponding art project for their calendars! Every day, the leader will determine if it’s a lion or a lamb day and then will place the corresponding picture on our March graph! I wonder which animal will “win”!
A new month, a new self-portrait! For March, the artists of Room #7 made simple, yet beautiful, self-portraits using black marker. They either chose to use a thick or a skinny marker and the results are stunning!
We have been talking a lot about all the different “h” brothers: “ch,” “th,” “sh,” and “wh” and the sounds they make. Last week, we brainstormed a list of words for each category, and now the cherubs are working hard to recognize them in their reading and writing. To reinforce this work, they played a game during our Word Work center in Reader’s Workshop. They had to identify the h brother in the word and then move their game piece to the corresponding space. Ask your child to tell you all the sounds and try to recognize them when they say them in conversation!
During Reader’s Workshop, the children have graduated to more challenging books where they need to put their “super reading powers” to work. We turned up the dial on these powers and made them extra strength. This week, our Kindergarten readers learned that they need to look at the whole picture to figure out unknown, tricky words. Additionally, they cannot rely on heavily patterned books anymore! Using extra strength snap word power can help them when sentences become more complex. They are taking this in stride and really working hard to decode these challenging books! Way to go, Super Readers!
Enjoy your weekend!