The Beginning of Kindergarten

We are well under way with many of the things that will be part of our "regular" schedule. These last couple of weeks we have spent time diving into our Fundations program (learning, practicing, and writing letters t, b, and f). This year we are trying something new and I am coteaching this program with Mrs. Read (kindergarten class next door) and Ms. Heather (Kindergarten Special Educator). We do some things in our own classroom, some learning all together and some broken up into groups. So far it is going really well and the kids are loving having so many teachers and combining with students in Mrs. Read's class. We have also continued our work in Writer's Workshop thinking of things we can teach other people and working on drawing and writing. Some big accomplishments these last two weeks have been making books and adding words just like famous authors. We also partnered up to practice our books, share what we did so far, and ask questions to help our partners add more. The work was amazing and the kids are pretending they are 8th graders! Watch the video below to see an especially awesome day in Writer's Wrkshop last week... In Math we have been working on writing numbers to five and have moved on from looking at 5-frames and groups of fives, to 10-frames. The kids have learned how to use a sign up pocket chart to choose a math station and we are slowly introducing new math games at each station. Ask your child what some of them are! The kindergartners are quickly becoming readers with books we have read through our Eric Carle studies, and also books they have made and now keep in their reading bins. The two books they have made are their own version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and a book like Brown Bear, Brown Bear but with the students in our class. We have also been studying the Monarch Butterfly and we were so lucky to have a caterpillar in our classroom turn into a chrysalis and then a butterfly. They literally watched the wings unfold under our document camera displayed up on the screen. We are learning "college" words through our science like "metamorphosis". Ask your child if they know what that word means!

We are moving on from our Monarch studies into apples, pumpkins, and leaves. We tasted different kinds of apples and recorded the graph of which apple students liked best in their science journal. We also had Four Winds where Shani, Rebecca, and Hans came in to teach the kids about sunlight and what makes day/night. They had a blast!