Kindergarten Week 13

by | Dec 5, 2015 | In The Loop

Language Arts 

This week the kindergartners showed off their sentence formation skills. They are doing a fantastic job using their daily high-frequency words in oral sentences. (I typically have to cut them off so we can move on to accomplish other tasks.) They are showing understanding of their words, sentences structures and how to use their little reading books as samples when forming their own sentences.

Our high-frequency words this week were: dijo – she said/he said, día – day, ella – she.  We continued with our sound-syllable study through class brainstorming, dictation, and exercises. The class is really impressive with the size of their brainstorming word banks! Their language acquisition is fabulous!

We read a fun book Copito de Nieve about an actual white gorilla who was shipped from Africa to a zoo in Barcelona.  Our story is all about Copito looking for animals like him. This was great for our color words, and to see how the students were following along with the story as they frequently jumped in to complete sentences.  Great learning!!

Math

We switched up our subitizing this week from dice to hearts and fingers.  Remember, the goal is to have automatic recognition of how many objects are in a set and then to count on (5 then 6,7,8 is the same as 5+8).

For our Calendar routine in December we have a new pattern and a new countdown until Christmas. We do have several students in our school who celebrate both Hanukah and Christmas so we are sure to talk about and incorporate both into our studies.  Happy Hanukah (Sunday, December 6th)!

Instant number recognition, counting by 1’s, 5’s and 10’s are all things that we worked on throughout the week as we finalized assessments for our report cards. We are very hands-on with our math time and the students are doing a great job grabbing cubes when they need manipulatives to help solve problems.  This was the case for  some this week when we worked on addition in our interactive math journals.

How can you reinforce math concepts at home? Play games!! Dice games provide great practice for all the skills we are working on.

Social Studies & Science

This week we started our Weather and Seasons unit.  In this unit we will be learning/reviewing units of time and their relationship to one another: day, week, month, year.  We will be learning about the four seasons in cyclical order as experienced in the U.S. and identifying a characteristics of each.  On Monday, we learned about how the seasons are different depending on our location on the earth (the North and South Poles are always cold in temperature, the middle section of the earth is usually warm and areas in between these experience the most differentiated seasons.  This is a fun time of year to  do this unit as we usually experience some exciting weather!  We are crossing our fingers for some snow!
About once a week the students write in their journals.  The kiddos are progressing nicely with labeling their illustrations, remembering capitals and periods, adding detail and using complete sentences.  This week we wrote about what we did over Thanksgiving break.  It sounds like a lot of fun was had by all from playing Monopoly to drawing and coloring, to eating pie!

Art

The kindergarteners used torn and cut paper to create a snowman collage this week. We looked at Lois Ehlert’s book about snowmen, and also at photos of snowmen. The students used basic shapes to create their own paper snowman in a snowy landscape. These delightful snowmen are on the bulletin board at school.

A NOTE ABOUT ART GRADES: I use art grades to let you know what topics in the curriculum we’ve covered and not as an indication of skill, since all children have wonderful creative abilities.