Halloween Week

After a windy day off from school, we started off last week with many stories of Halloween plans and costumes. As a way to end October, students got to spend a bit of time Tuesday morning enjoying other kindergarten classrooms and teachers playing and exploring other spaces and activities. We continued to learn more letters and letter sounds during Reader's Workshop. Last week we talked about j, k, l, and w. It is exciting to see how far they have come with understanding letters and sounds. Lately, they have taken it upon themselves to think of their own words that start with the letters and sounds they have learned so far and it has become a bit of a game during snack time. During Reader's Workshop we also continued to talk about Old Favorite Storybooks. Our focus last week was adding to our story to make it sound like a story which we will be continuing this week.
In Writer's Workshop we have finished talking about personal stories for a while and have begun discussing science writing. We ended last week looking at trees and drawing about what we see to explain what we see to our readers.  In addition, we have also begun thinking about writing as more than a page. Students began science books that we will be adding to this coming week.
In math we are continuing to look at the numbers 1-10 (especially 6-10) as we think about different ways of making those numbers. During math time we are also practicing listening to each other and thinking about what others have said through partner activities. We have been talking about and playing games with the teen numbers as well and the students really enjoy trying to figure out where Hap the grasshopper is hiding on our number line during Hide and Seek with Hap. With the change of the month our class calendar has changed too. As you might know, each month a new math idea is presented in the calendar. Each calendar day presents a new piece in a pattern as well as some other concept. This month we will be talking about a few 3-D shapes and will be comparing them to the 2-D shapes that we talked about in September. In the few days we've had so far in November we have looked at squares and cubes.
During Forest Friday, we found and labeled all the students' sit spots on a map of the hill behind the classroom which was a lot of fun to watch the students think through. There were some very interesting and logical responses to the question "How do you know?" which was exciting to see. We will continue to talk about mapping as part of our social studies curriculum. We continued to take advantage of the outdoors as much as possible even pulling on our puddle pants and going outside on the rainy days!