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!
The cherubs and I have been concentrating on saying and hearing the middle sounds in words. This is helping the class develop an understanding of how words are put together. The long vowel sounds, which sound like their letter names (a, e, i, o, u), are the easiest to hear. First, we listened to the sounds without looking at the letters, and, later we began to compare words and connect sounds with letters.
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!
- 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!
- Humpty Dumpty (egg station) – On Monday, 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!
- Opposite Top-it – Using number cards, this partner card game is similar to the game, War. Each student put down a number card, and together they decided which number was the least. The child with the lesser number card won and took the two cards.
- Clear the Board – As we continue to work with addition, students partnered together at this fun and engrossing game. Each student received a game board and 10 cubes. They placed their cubes on numbers that they thought they would roll. Next, the kids took turns rolling two dice. When the dice were added together and if the kids had cubes on that number, they could remove them. The first person to “clear the board” won!
- Dr. Seuss Addition Mats: 1 Fish, 2 Fish – Using animal manipulatives, Room #7 mathematicians created various addition number sentences
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”!
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!