Kinder News!: Weekly News (Sept. 15-19)

It's hard to believe we have already been in school for 4 whole weeks! The children have learned our classroom routines and how to transition between activities, and we are off and running now! Take a peek to see what we have been learning this week.

Math

This week the children had their first introduction to coins as we worked together to find ways to sort a collection of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. After reviewing how we sorted our button collection last week, the children came up with several great ways to sort our coins. We sorted our coins by color, size, and value. We will continue to revisit coins throughout the year. The children also practiced counting up and back from 10 and worked to match numbers with a given collection of items. We talked more about measurement this week and the concept of length. The children had to find objects in the room that were both shorter and taller than a kindergartener. Our findings are shown below!

Reinforcing the concepts of shorter and taller

We are shorter than the easel!

We spent some time reviewing shapes, and we also began exploring the concept of patterns this week, which lays the foundation for many math concepts. We worked on color patterns and talked about the different patterns we could follow such as an AB pattern, an AAB pattern, or even an ABB pattern. Check out our color patterns below. We even painted our own dot patterns during center time!

Pattern painting!

Jolly Phonics

This week the children learned the sounds and motions for the following letters:

/c/ as in "cat"

/k/ as in "kite"

/e/ as in "elephant"

/h/ as in "hot"

We reviewed all the sounds we have learned, and we watched our first Jolly Phonics video, which the children really enjoyed! Please continue to review all of the sounds at home too using your child's Jolly Phonics Sound Book. In class, we practice naming the sounds while doing the motion.

Literacy

For our read aloud stories this week, we did an author and illustrator study. The children loved listening to books written by Audrey Wood, and they were excited to learn that many of her books are illustrated by her husband Don or her son Bruce! In The Napping House, a small little flea bites a mouse, causing a chain reaction in the napping house and wakes everyone up. Silly Sally was a fun book about Sally who walks to town backwards and upside down--the children had a good laugh during that read aloud! We even made our own class book showing "Kindergarteners Walking Backwards Upside Down!" We practiced counting back from 10 in Ten Little Fish, and we solved the mystery of the missing letter "x" in Alphabet Mystery. We finished the week learning about opposites in Audrey Wood's book Quick as a Cricket. The children loved her stories!

The children were also introduced to Writer's Workshop this week, and they have been doing an amazing job. They are learning the four steps we follow during our writing time--think, draw, label, and then write--and they are gaining more and more confidence each day. Next week we will be using the sentence starter "I can______" for our writing. When writing words, the children are doing a nice job listening for the beginning sound and some children are hearing the middle and ending sounds too. As we continue to practice our writing and learn more sounds, the children will gain more confidence as they stretch out and record the sounds they hear.

During our Reader's Workshop time this week, the children learned about the different ways we can read a book.

We practiced looking at the cover and finding important information like the title and the name of the author and/or illustrator. We then practiced reading by looking at and talking about the pictures and reading the words we knew. We looked for pictures, words, and phrases that were repeated in our books and agreed that those pictures and words must be important if we see them over and over again. Check us out in action below!