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!