Room #7 is back at it! We are entering the final stretch of Kindergarten: there are fewer than thirty days of school left, and we are busier than ever! Read on to see all the learning your cherubs have been accomplishing! Additionally, this will be the last newsletter of the school year. We have a bunch of end-of-the-year activities that the kiddos will tackle, so make sure to ask them what they are up to! I hope you have enjoyed reading the weekly highlights this year and keeping up with all that your talented and beautiful kiddos have learned! It has been an absolute pleasure being your children’s teacher!!!
Room #7 boys and girls are beyond excited that their plants are growing! We have been talking extensively about what plants need in order to grow, and we have discussed the different parts of plants. Ask your child about his/her plant and what his/her responsibilities are in order to nurture it.
We are in the thick of our mini-unit on persuasive writing. Room #7 has been talking about problems that they see at Hastings: outside at recess, at lunch, in the hallways, in Room #7, etc. They learned that they can use their pencils as magic wands to help solve issues around the school. After identifying a problem, the kiddos thought about what some possible solutions are to the problem and then started writing. They could choose how they wanted to write to solve their problems. Writers could pick from letter paper, regular paper, or they could even make signs! Next, in order to persuade their audience, they had to explain why the problem needed to stop! This is tricky work, but the cherubs are very excited to exact some changes in our school!
Math stations continue to work on 3-D shapes. Are you finding any in your homes?
- 3-D Shape Books - Is it a cone? A cylinder? A prism? At this station, the boys and girls cut and pasted the matching 3-D shape to its correct page. Then, they had to draw a real-world example of that shape (e.g., an ice cream cone) and write a sentence about the shape! This was multi-step work and they excelled at it! Way to go, Kindergartners!
- Tricky Triangles – Following our Launch the Learning 2 weeks ago, the students were prompted to see how many triangles they could make using a variety of pattern blocks! What fun!
- 3-D Shape Color - The boys and girls did an outstanding job recognizing what each shape was called at this center and then coloring that shape accordingly!
- Geo-block Match-up – This week, the students observed some three-dimensional geo-blocks. We talked about how these blocks have faces. The faces are common shapes that the students see every day (squares, triangles, and rectangles). In this game, the students received a geo-block game board. Their job was to reach in the basket, pick out a block, and determine if any of the faces matched a shape on their board. The complicated part of this game was that many of the shapes had different shaped faces. For example, some triangular shaped geo-blocks had rectangular faces as well. It was tricky!
- Recording Designs and Creations – At this inventive station, the boys and girls learned to analyze positions and notice lengths and quantities. The cherubs created designs using various pattern blocks and then copied those designs by gluing down paper shapes that matched the blocks. It was most important that they built with the blocks first and not simply created a design using the paper shapes. In this manner, the challenge in this task was in the reproduction. Everyone came up with really neat and sometimes complex designs!
- 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!
Enjoy your weekend everyone! Hope it’s a great one!