Weekly News! (Aug. 26-30)

It's official!  We have successfully completed our first full week of kindergarten, and it's been a super week!  The children have done a great job learning our daily routines, and we are off to a great start.  Take a peek below to see what we have been learning this week.

Math
This week in math, we spent some time exploring and sorting our pattern blocks.  We talked about the different colors of our blocks as well as the number of sides each block had.  Then we named each shape.

We also worked together to create a class pictograph using our interactive whiteboard to show the different ways we get to school each day.  Then we counted up the total number of children for each type of transportation.  Check out our results below!

 K-2 How Do We Get to School?

We began reviewing some of our shapes this week including the circle, square, and triangle.  We completed a sorting activity with our dinosaur friend "Circle-osaurus!" Circle-osaurus was a very hungry dinosaur, but he was very picky.  He would only eat circles!  The children did a great job completing this shape sorting activity that also reinforced following directions and fine motor skills!

Literacy

The children absolutely LOVED our Pete the Cat read aloud stories this week.  They were still singing Pete's songs come Friday!  In all the books we read this week, Pete helped us learn that even when things don't go our way, we should keep a positive attitude and keep moving on because as Pete says, "It's all good!"  Below are the three Pete the Cat books we read this week.  I included a link to the song for each book.  I know the children will love hearing the stories again and again, and I am sure they would be thrilled to check them out at the library too!

Click here for link to this story.

Click here for the link to this story.

Click here for the link to this story.

We also reviewed our ABC's this week while reading a big book titled Animals in the Park during shared reading and during read aloud when we read Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten.  We completed several ABC activities that reviewed both upper and lowercase letters, and we reviewed the sequence of the alphabet while singing the ABC song!  We finished in our "First Week in Kindergarten Books" as well, which we will keep in our classroom writing portfolios.

Assessment

This week I began meeting with students individually to assess their literacy skills.  I have been using the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmarking Assessment to determine students' reading levels.  This information will help me to organize our guided reading groups.  I love meeting with the students one-on-one.  It really helps me get to know each of my students!  While I was assessing, the rest of the students were working in centers throughout the room, and they did an AWESOME job using whisper voices as they worked!

Gym and Music

Take a peek below to get a glimpse of music and gym class!

Morning Kindergarten in Music Class

Afternoon Kindergarten in Gym Class

Thanks for reading!  Have a great weekend!