Friday October 25

We went batty for spider and bat nonfiction texts this week! Over the course of the week, we read many informational books packed with facts about these creepy creatures. Ask your child to name some parts of a bat or a spider, and see what he or she learned!

After reading numerous nonfiction texts, we put that knowledge to work in Writer's Workshop, labeling bat and spider images with our new vocabulary! Labeling pictures during writing serves more than one purpose. First, stretching the sounds we hear in a word or phrase is a more manageable task than tackling a whole sentence or story. Second, by engaging with nonfiction texts as learners and then imitating them as writers, we internalize the elements of the informational genre.

Mrs. Albright finished up her mini pumpkin unit with the grand finale... making pumpkin pie in a cup! The kids followed the instructions together to mix pudding, spices, graham crackers, and cool whip in a cup. Ask your child what he or she thought of the final product!

We hope that you will take time to sit side by side with your kindergartener and talk about what they learned over the course of the pumpkin lessons. Flip through each page and discuss your child's favorite lessons and which facts were brand new! The very last page can be completed together using words and/or pictures to describe a pumpkin.

This week, we learned the sounds and formation for lowercase e and r. We are halfway through the alphabet and we know all the vowels. Moving forward, we will spend a little time each day drilling down and really paying attention to the position of our mouths when we make the 5 different vowel sounds. Even good readers need a solid foundation in letter sounds, especially vowels, in order to be strong writers, spellers, and advanced decoders.

In math, we have switched gears and are spending some time determining names and attributes of shapes. We are working on 2D shapes currently and will soon move on to 3D. Often times, kids assume they know the names of the shapes but really only have a surface level understanding. They frequently identify shapes as the most common representation of it. (For example, they think that all hexagons look like a hexagon, when in reality ANY shape that has six straight connecting sides and 6 corners is a hexagon!)

On kindergarten magic day, we rotated between all three kindergarten classes and completed some fun bat and spider books and activities.

Look how much our tree changed in just one week. We LOVE fall and hope it lasts a while longer so we can admire and play in the leaves!