March 5-March 9

We have had a nice week back from vacation. The kids have gotten right back in the groove of the classroom routine and the independence they are showing is really incredible. The spring of kindergarten is so much different from the fall, and it has been really fun to have more time to work with small groups while other students are actively engaged in their own work.
We finished up our Red Clover readings today. Everyone really enjoyed hearing many books over the two weeks and having different adults from around the school read to them each day. We will vote next week in the library for our favorite books.
In literacy we have continued our word family study by sorting words from the -an and -ad families. Before vacation we worked with the -at word family. This is helping students look at CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant) which will really support both their reading and writing by isolating sounds, looking at the beginning and ending of words, and seeing familiar "chunks" in words.
In Writer's Workshop we started a new unit, revisiting narrative stories. We will be practicing writing true stories over several pages. Our work will be around telling a story that has a beginning, middle, and end, pictures with detail that help the reader, and writing full sentences with spaces between our words, beginning middle and ending sounds for each word we spell, "snap" words spelled correctly, and punctuation.
In Reader's Workshop we have talked this week about how as we grow as readers, the pattern books get more challenging as well. They may have more words, a surprised ending, and then books begin not having a pattern anymore even though they have many "snap" words (sight words) that we know, and the pictures still help support what's happening in the text.
In math we have focused on measurement this week. The vocabulary that we measure the "length" of something was new for many. We have discussed words like shorter, longer, the same, shortest, longest, greater than, less than. We are learning the symbols for greater than > and less than < to compare numbers, as well as measuring in different ways with our feet, popsicle sticks, and unifix cubes.
We have been reading books about maple sugaring to learn about how maple syrup is made, and some true stories about women who have changed the world, for Women's History Month.