Friday News Flash!

Triangles, Hexagons and Squares. Oh my!

Geometry is upon us and your kids are off to a great start! To open our study of shapes I gave kids one task, make a picture with pattern blocks. It can be any type of picture you want, and students went wild with math. Discussions came up about how to make different shapes such as a square with two triangles or how many ways we could find to make a hexagon. I was blown away by students engagement and their creative pictures. After they made their picture we did a gallery walk so everyone could see each others designs, and then we recorded how many blocks of each shape we had and totaled them. The student with the most shapes used 39 blocks total for his picture! At home you can have students find shapes, draw shapes and using the name of shapes when identifying objects to build their math vocabulary. Here are a few examples of the creative pictures your students came up with:

If I were President...

Presidents Day is just around the corner and this week we learned about two Presidents (George Washington and Abraham Lincoln) as well as looking at what a President does. Students were amazed by the fact that secret service follow them everywhere and that President Obama has his own chef! Students also looked at what a hard job it is trying to make everyone get along and hear everyone's ideas. We finished by making self portraits as Presidents, where they had to draw their features and write their last name, and also wrote about what we would do if we were President. Here are a few adorable examples:

Make friends with everyone.

Everyone clean your room before you have ice cream.

These next few weeks will be busy with Valentine's approaching, 100th day of school approaching and our field trip to see the play Bad Kitty. I will try and post more often but I promise I will at least post on Friday.

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Friday News Flash!

Happy Friday! In class this week we have been going over the rules and procedures again as many students had a hard time remembering this week. We will continue this work next week to make our class run as smoothly as we can!

Thank You Cards 

Next week our cook Gail will be retiring and as a class we made her thank you notes. I was so impressed with how thoughtful the students were! They came up with many great ideas like "We should said that we will miss her" or "can I put love and my name so she remembers me?" They were truly beautiful sentiments, not to mention the beautiful writing and pictures that they drew! Here are a few examples of cards that students were working on:

A student draws a photo of the cook with the kitchen counter.

 

"Thank you Gail! We will miss you!"

Reading at Home

Reading at home is an integral part to helping your child's reading development. As we move toward first grade (I can't believe I am saying that already!) we are really working on students becoming independent in their reading. You can help support this at home by having students sound out unknown words and helping them blend the sounds together, having them guess at an unknown word based off of the picture and simply letting them try and ask them if it makes sense. By helping them practice these strategies they will in turn internalize these strategies so they can do them with their own independent reading. This is such an exciting time for your child's reading development and it is only going to keep getting better!

As I mentioned I spent all last Friday working on report cards and I have to say it was more fun than I thought it would be! It was fabulous getting to look over all your children's work and see how much they have grown. It made me even more proud of them! Thank you for sharing them with me and for your support on their journey through Kindergarten!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Friday News Flash!

Wow what a busy first week back! Even though it turned into a 4 day week due to ice it was packed with practicing our routines and schedules, and gearing up for more assessments that we will be doing next week for report cards. This week was essentially a big review in terms of classroom behavior and academics. Here are a few fun new things  we did this week that students really enjoyed:

Writing to our Pen Pals

This week we got letters back from our Pen Pals in Mexico and so we decided to send them letters telling them what we did over winter break. I explained to the kids that in Mexico it doesn't snow and it is probably very hot on Christmas so the kids were eager to share about their experiences in the snow and ice! Not only was this a great time for cultural exploration it was also a wonderful way to ease back into their writing. Here are a few examples that students did:

It was snowing at my house.

I was sliding down the deck.

Snowman Tally Marks

In math we have been practicing using tally marks, which you will see in this weeks homework as well, and we learned a new memory game that involved snowmen and tally marks; what could be more fun?! In this game students set up their cards in a grid and flipped cards over trying to match the snowman's number with the tally marks. Squeals of joy erupted around the room as students found pairs and were so ecstatic to come tell me how many tally marks their card had! We will be continuing our practice around tally marks and number recognition in addition to beginning our study of geometry in the coming weeks.

Two students playing Snowman Tally Marks.

I really gave the kids some perspective this week when I said that we are almost halfway through Kindergarten and so we are working toward becoming First Graders! Their eyes got huge, first in fear, but then in excitement as I told them that now they know how to behave in school and will be allowed to do more older kid activities if they can prove that they are ready to behave like First Graders. It's hard to believe, but these kiddos are growing up fast. These next months they will be changing so much in every way and I am so grateful I get to be a part of it.

Smiles,

Miss Adams