It has been a crazy 2 weeks with all of our snow days! It's hard to get momentum when we keep having days off! The Kindergartners of room #7 were troopers, though. Here are only a few of the highlights from the past two weeks.
In Math, we are delving into measurement, equivalency, and number models. The boys and girls of Room #7 have been working hard to really challenge themselves and do their very best!
- 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!
- Snap It! – Working with numbers six to twelve, students made trains of cubes. They then “snap” their trains at various places. Putting part of their trains in front of them and placing the other part behind them, students worked to figure out how many were hidden. In this manner, students are learning to describe a number by its parts. For those tricky high numbers, students used invisible buddy lines as a strategy to determine the hidden number. Fabulous work, cherubs!
- Fix-it Strips – At this center, students continued to work on the tricky concept of “changing numbers.” Independently, the kiddos received a fix-it strip. Using cubes, they created an organized pile that represented their first number. Next, they changed that pile to match the second number. Lastly, they articulated if they added or took away cubes and how many cubes they needed to make the change. The cherubs have really gotten the hang of this station – they challenged themselves by doing this activity with teen numbers! Holy Moly!
- Cookie Subtraction – After reading The Duckling Gets a Cookie by Mo Willems last week, the mathematicians learned all about subtraction. This week, they practiced it! Picking a just-right recording sheet for them, they worked on finishing subtraction number sentences. They rocked it!
- ipad – Subitize Tree –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!
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.
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 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!
I hope those of you who were able to attend the Publishing Party enjoyed your child’s narrative stories! They worked extremely hard on their writing and were incredibly proud of all their work! I hope you all were too!