It has been so great being able to meet with each of you and chat about your child’s successes! Thank you for your time and efforts in continuing to support our Kindergarten family! Room #7 is full of busy bees! The kiddos have been hard at work; keep reading to see some of the highlights!
As it is a new month, the kids created gorgeous, one-of-a-kind self-portraits using oil pastels. As usual, they concentrated on including all the features of their faces into their pictures. Many even included extra details by adding intricate and festive designs to their shirts. Come on by Room #7 to sneak a peek at the cherubs’ handiwork!
As you know, the students of Room #7 have been working on their rhyming words. They learned that rhyming words rhyme when they have the same ending sound. On Wednesday, the class read The Hungry Thing. This book describes a ravenous monster that continually asks the townspeople to Feed Him. When he asks for food, though, he uses made-up words that rhyme with the actual food he wants. For example, the Hungry Thing asks for “gollipops” when he really wants lollipops! The class became rhyming experts and was able to shout out together exactly what the Hungry Thing really meant to say. Afterwards, I was the Hungry Thing and some boys and girls had to make up rhymes for the food they were holding. For example, one student said he would give me some born instead of the actual food, corn. The kids loved this activity and we will definitely be doing this again!
Room #7 is full of writers! They are writing up a storm! It’s amazing to see how much they are writing. For the past few weeks, the cherubs have been working hard to remember what good writers must do to create. Here’s a list they came up with. Your children think about:
- Writing true stories that happen to them
- Visualizing their story so they can draw all the details
- Labeling their pictures
- Being a Rock Star Speller (how many letters can they write for each word)
- Revising (Yes! Revising! “When you think you’re done, you’ve only just begun.”)
- Solving Problems – The boys and girls are independently attempting to solve problems as they arise while they work (e.g., need a new piece of paper, not sure what to write, writing words they don’t know)
- Being independent and the “boss” of their own writing!
- Using their circle words
Due to the half days, leaf print T-shirts, and Fall Parade, we repeated our stations from last week in Math! In this unit, students are working a lot with shapes – learning their names, understanding their attributes, and describing the differences among them. Ask them what each shape looks like! (circle, rhombus, square, rectangle, trapezoid, hexagon, and triangle)!
This week, we also talked A LOT about teen numbers, both how you form them as well as what they mean (e.g., 11 is 10 + 1). This will take a lot of practice, but once the skill is cemented, students will have a more solid number sense of what constitutes a number. It can often be tricky to remember which number comes first in the teens. In order to help the students recall how these numbers are formed, we listened to and sang a new song. Go to the following link to hear the fun rap! You can even sing it at home!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W5aYi3lkho&safe=active
Afterwards, partners worked together to order numbers one through twenty, and they even noticed some patterns that popped up when seeing them in a line!
On Halloween, students worked to complete unique pumpkin glyphs. Last week, students painted their very own pumpkins, mixing yellow and red to make orange. This week, they created jack-o’-lanterns out of these pumpkins. The students individualized their pumpkins according to the rules of the glyph. For example, if a student is a boy, he cut out circle eyes. If the student has 2 syllables in his/her name, then he/she cut out a happy mouth. They had a blast working to construct pumpkins that reflected parts of their own identity!
Have a fabulous weekend!