This week in Kindergarten...

In Fundations, we introduced the letters t and g. Hopefully, your child will be able to point out these letters and make their sound when you are reading books at home. We also talked more about sentences versus words, and ending punctuation. The children are becoming really skilled at finding letters, words and sentences in our morning message each day.

We used the rest of our yummy apples to make some delicious applesauce. The children loved it! Everybody wanted seconds. They did a great job learning how to cut the apples themselves and wrote their own recipe as we completed our project. Here is the recipe for any interested families...

Applesauce Recipe

In Writers' Workshop, we began taking our loose leaf ideas and putting them into larger expert topic books. The children have loved illustrating with color and are beginning to get the hang of using letters and words, as well as pictures, in their writing. We also authored our first whole class book on a topic we are experts about. Our book is about ways that we can be kind. I can't wait to share it with you all at conferences!

In Math, we started playing how many dot games with our ten frames, introduced some numeral matching games and a fun unifix cube game called, "Beat You to Five". These games are a great way to reinforce number sense and children often ask to play them during choice time.

In Readers' Workshop, the children have been continuing to learn about what it means to be a reader, how to read with a partner successfully, and the differences between learn about the world books and old favorite story books. This week, we began to study wolves. We love to read fairy tales together and noticed that a lot of these stories have wolves in them. We learned a lot about what wolves eat, where they live, how they camouflage and can't wait to learn more next week. The children are doing a great job looking at a page, and adding a pinch of themselves to that page with their thinking and noticing.

During Forest Friday this week, we played wolf pack tag, noticed the world around us from our sit spots, had snack and observed the weather, continued to build with sticks and logs and explore our "forest", and continued up our path through the tall grass that we had built. We made it to the top of the hill! The children were excited and proud. Upon getting to the top of the hill, we discovered some great vines and branches to climb and swing on and stumbled upon a geocache. We felt pretty lucky and the geocache was filled with a pinecone, and some buzzies! We took a blue buzzy and placed the geocache back where we found it.

Finally, we filled our buzzy jar! The children voted to bring stuffed animals in on Friday. They wrote with us, came to circle with us, read books with us and played with us. It was a fun day.

I have a few important reminders for the upcoming week...We have no school on Wednesday for Yom Kippur. We also have a walking field trip to the Williston Fire Department on Thursday afternoon. I will be sending a permission slip home on Monday afternoon.