Week of Jan 9

This week Ms. B came and spent two days with us while I did some math assessing with students. It is always a treat to see them one on one, and have that time with each student. It is exciting to see the progress they've made this fall and how proud they are of what they know. So much of kindergarten is learning the social piece of coming to school, being a learner, getting along with others, learning the routine of the day. It is such a big year and the children gain so much maturity in such a short amount of time.
The second half of kindergarten is often a time when we can delve more into the academics as the kids are well adjusted to school and can do more activities independently while we as teachers can pull small groups of children to work on skills specific to what each child is ready for. We will continue to work on the social aspects in everything we do and will build on student's knowledge to be readers, writers, and mathematicians.
 There is always a big range of learners in kindergarten. In literacy we will spend time making sure that children know their letter sounds and sight words to help them with early reading and writing. Some children are working on knowing their sounds and sight words fluently and some are ready for guided reading groups. In writing we are working on sticking to the topic, using detail in our pictures, and depending on the child either labeling pictures or adding one word on the bottom, or perhaps a full sentence.
In math we will build our oral counting skills, focusing on words like "what comes just before ____" or "what number comes just after____" as well as recognizing numbers, writing numbers, building numbers on our fingers, recognizing them on ten frames, etc.
Ms. S. continues to visit our classroom on Thursdays. She wrapped up her work with Kelso, although we will continue to talk about big and small problems and use different choices to try to solve small problems. The ones that come more easily to kindergartners are "talk it out" or "ask them to stop" and we try to encourage kids to also try things like "ignore" and "make a different choice". These are harder choices because kids have to compromise or not necessarily get what they wanted (the toy, the first turn, etc). Ms. S will now focus on teaching around "The Zones". So far we have learned about the red zone, when we feel angry or upset and out of control. We learned yesterday about the green zone, where we are calm, relaxed, and ready to learn.