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?).
- 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!
- 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!
- iPad – subtraction or addition game! – This week, the cherubs were able to pick which skill they wanted to practice! Having that choice gave them extra ownership, and they were really able to hone in on either operation!
- Two Color Grab Bag - Students picked a bag, took out a handful of cubes, and sorted them according to color. After counting each color cube, they decided which was more and which was less. Finally, they figured out how many more and less!
- Fix-it Strips –
- Dr. Seuss (1 More/1 Less) – Using three dice, students rolled and counted to see how many dots they had in all. After recording that number, they then had to determine what was one more and one less than that number. Challenge! Some students used 4 dice! Holy moly!
This month’s self-portraits are fantastic! Students used a mixture of yarn and string, paint, construction paper, colored pencils and the art of collage to create one-of-a-kind masterpieces! Stop by to see their works of art if you can!
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”!
Room #7 has officially begun our chick unit! The kids couldn’t be more excited. On Monday, after reading the book Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones by Ruth Heller, the class discussed a new vocabulary word: oviparous! This fun word to say means to hatch from an egg. Then the class did a sort of various animals and insects to decide which were oviparous and which were not. This conversation segued into which creatures are mammals AND how one can tell what a mammal is. Ask your child to tell you which animals are mammals and which are oviparous! You’ll be surprised by their answers.
Next Monday, all three Kindergarten classes will receive eggs for our Egg to Chick unit. In order to prepare for this, on Wednesday, I introduced the different parts of the incubator and explained why each one is important to the development of the chicken embryo. The cherubs were fascinated and enjoyed illustrating the incubator in their Chick journals! They cannot wait for the eggs to arrive!
The kiddos are learning to separate and identify a number of sounds in words, and they are beginning to connect initial sounds and letters from one word to another. This is going to help the children figure out words sound by sound as they read. It will also enable them to keep track of their reading of a whole text like a story book.
Together, we’ve been snipping out one sound and replacing it with another, which helps the class use knowledge of one word to write or read another. Here’s a game that’s easy, and the children love playing it (and they learn a lot from it).
• You say a word and ask your child to change the first sound. So if you say mop your child might say hop, stop, pop, drop.
• Again, this is a game that can be played anywhere, anytime – try it in the car, at the park, while taking a walk.
Say it – and play it!
Have a fabulous weekend!