Weekly News (Dec. 5-9)

All this snow...what a great way to kick off December!!

All About Me

We loved learning all about Gia this week. We learned that Gia enjoys playing Barbies and playing with her Baby Alive doll. She also enjoys collecting Beanie Boo stuffed animals, and she likes to play on the iPad. Gia likes to save her money, and she is excited about learning how to ice skate! Gia enjoys spending time with her family too and going on vacation to Greece!

Math

This week in math we practiced our graphing skills during a "Spin and Graph Gingerbread" activity. We spun the spinner 10 times and graphed our results. Then we analyzed our results to find the gingerbread with the least and most spins. We practiced our addition skills as well! 

We also revisited the concept of measurement this week with our 5th grade buddies from Mr. Holston's class. We used nonstandard units, small and large gingerbread men, to take measurements of objects throughout our classroom. After looking at our results, we concluded that it took more small gingerbread men than large gingerbread men for each item we measured. Take a peek at us in action below! There are more pictures on our photos page too.

Jolly Phonics

It's great to see the students gaining more and more confidence with their sounds each week. We started our last set of Jolly Phonics this week, and we will finish the last few sounds before winter break. This week we learned the sounds for:

qu as in "quack"

ou as in "out"

oi as in "oil"

Literacy

Reading Workshop

We continued to explore different versions of the orignal Gingerbread Man story this week. The class had a great time comparing and singing the refrains from the following stories: The Gingerbread Girl and The Gingerbread Cowboy. Next week we will compare The Gingerbread Baby and The Cajun Cornbread Boy. The class also LOVED seeing our hallway transformed into a gingerbread wonderland!!

Writing Workshop

I loved reading the students' weekend writing pieces. It's always fun to see what the children have been doing, and it's amazing to see how they continue to grow as writers each week. We continue to work on stretching out our sounds and leaving spaces between words. We have also been working on setting individual goals for our writing each week and then reflecting on how we did toward meeting those goals.

Art Appreciation

A big thank you to Dhilan's mom for coming in for an art appreciation lesson this week and teaching us about Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. We learned about his life as an artist, and we also had a chance to walk around and watch her eyes as they looked like they were following us!

Hour of Code

In the LMC this week, the students participated in the "Hour of Code" and explored the world of coding as they used two coding apps--Kodable and The Foos. Check out the Dryden LMC page for more coding resources!

Science

Take a peek at our science page to see how we wrapped up our Rainbows, Color, and Light Unit!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Thanks for reading!

Weekly News (Nov. 28-Dec. 2)

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Math
This week we introduced the concept of a number story using gingerbread boys and girls. For example, "James made 4 gingerbread boy cookies and Kate made 2 gingerbread girl cookies. How many cookies did they make in all?" We also practiced writing a number sentence (or a number model) to match each story, 4 + 2 + 6.

The children also learned about symmetry this week by looking at many different examples of symmetrical shapes. We learned that objects have symmetry when they are the same on both sides. We also learned that objects can have up and down (vertical) symmetry, side-to-side (horizontal) symmetry, or multiple lines of symmetry like the examples below. Then we practiced creating our own symmetrical gingerbread men.

Jolly Phonics
It's great to see how well the students are doing stretching out the sounds they hear when labeling their pictures in their Jolly Phonics notebooks and in their daily writing activities. Keep up the great work K-2!

This week we learned the following two Jolly Phonics sounds:

"sh" as in "ship"
"th" as in "this" and "thumb"

Literacy
Reading Workshop
This week we finished the last two interactive read aloud lessons for our Fiction Unit, and we will begin our mini-lessons when we return from break. As a class, we worked to create a story map after reading the book A Balloon for Isabel. In this story, Isabel tries to convince her teacher that she and Walter, both porcupines, should receive balloons on kindergarten graduation day just like the other children. As we listened closely to the story, we identified the characters and the setting as well as the problem the characters were trying to solve. In this story the characters were very resourceful and made several attempts to solve their problem before finding a solution that would work. We learned some valuable lessons from this story too as you can see from our story map below!

The children also did a terrific job during another reading workshop lesson this week. Using the wordless book Wave by Suzy Lee, the children learned how to describe the details in the illustrations to tell a realistic story just like a storyteller would from beginning to end. Using words like the ones in the illustration below, the children worked together to tell the story of the Wave.

Writing Workshop
This week we worked on writing about our Thanksgiving holiday break. I loved reading about all the fun and exciting things the children did over the long break. The children continue to grow as writers, and they are doing a great job really stretching out their words. We have been working on listening for middle sounds when writing, leaving spaces between words, and ending our sentences with a period. It's great to see how much they have grown since the beginning of the year!

Science
Click here to learn more about our science explorations this week!

Weekly Photos
Click here to see some photos from the week too!

Hope everyone enjoys the week and our first snowfall of the year!