This week it was Jadynn's turn to bring her Me Box, and we loved learning about all of her favorite things! Jadynn loves to listen to music, play with her Barbies, and spend time with her cousin and her family. She is also a cheerleader, and she loves to accessorize!!
Math
This week we worked to combine our graphing and tallying skills. Earlier in the week the students drew a picture of their favorite pet. We then graphed and tallied our results. Dogs were the clear favorite followed up by fish! Later in the week as we were gearing up for some of our St. Patrick Day activities, we talked about some of our favorite green foods. We narrowed our choices down to four green foods--green apples, artichokes, broccoli, and kiwi. We drew a pictures of our favorite foods, graphed our results, and drew tally marks to represent our totals. Green apples came out on top!
As we have been learning about tally marks, we have been using rhymes and visuals to help us remember how to draw tally marks to make groups of 5. Below is the rhyme we have been practicing.
This week we have also been learning more about our number grid that shows the numbers from 0-100. The number grid will be a tool that the children will use often in first grade, so in kindergarten we are working to help students begin to see the relationships among the numbers on the grid and to develop their number sense. Below are a couple of the activities we did this week to become more familiar with the number grid.
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| We highlighted to show that each row is a new count by 10. |
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| We used blue chips to show counts by 5 and then placed red chips on our counts by 10. Since our counts by 10 already had blue circles, when we placed our red chips on the 10's, they magically changed to purple! You should have heard the ooh's and ahh's! It was a great way for students to visually see the relationship between counting by 5's and 10's. |
Using our number grid, we also played "Guess My Number" where a number on the number grid was hidden, and the students had to guess that number. We played an "I Spy" game as well where students were told a number, and they quickly had to find that number on the grid. Earlier this week a packet was sent home with a 100's chart and some games for you to play at home. Please play these number grid games with your children at home often. It's a great way to really build that understanding of numbers and how they relate to each other.
We finished the week creating our own leprechaun number stories. Students rolled a die to "get some gold." Then they rolled the die again to get some more gold and then counted how much gold they collected in all. They created some "gold coins" to show their gold and wrote a number sentence to match. These will be on display in a class book at conferences!
Literacy/Technology
This week we continued the theme of weather with a focus on seasons. We worked in our workbooks, read a new sight word book, and introduced two new sight words--and and what. The children have learned quite a few sight words up to this point, and many of these words cannot be sounded out. That's why students need to be able to recognize them "on sight," so continued practice with these words at home is very helpful!
We read a story called In the Yard about a girl helping take care of her family's yard throughout each of the four seasons. This story provided great practice for the students with inferencing. The author of the story never mentioned the names of the different seasons, but through the use of pictures and descriptive words, the children were able to uncover the message the author was trying to convey.
We continued our exploration of the different seasons with an exciting research project that the students completed this week. Each student chose their favorite season and did some research about that season in the computer lab using a kid friendly researching engine called Pebble Go. Then the children chose three reasons why they love that season. After illustrating and writing down their three reasons, I recorded each student reading their sentences. Using a program called Chirbit, I was able to create a QR code for each student's recording. I printed out the QR codes and attached them to their work, which you can see below. These will be on display for conferences, so if you don't already have a QR Code Reader app, feel free to download one and bring your favorite device (iPad, iPod Touch, smartphone) to listen to your child's voice. If you can't download a QR reader app, I can let you know at conferences how to find your child's recording online!
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| This is what a QR code looks like! |
In the spirit of seasons and crazy weather, we read a very imaginative story called Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs about a town called Chewandswallow where it rains orange juice and hails pancakes. Yikes! After reading the story, the children practiced sequencing the events in the story and identifying the main ideas by drawing pictures to represent the beginning, middle, and end of the story. The children added labels to their pictures as well!
We continue to develop our writing skills during Writer's Workshop. We are now working to write multiple sentences when expressing our ideas and to extend our ideas using details! This week we wrote about some of our favorite green foods! Wow, what a busy and productive week!
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| Happy St. Patrick's Day from K-2! Looking forward to seeing you all at conferences! |
