If you have heard snip-its of our morning song and wondering what the whole thing sounds like, here it is to enjoy at home:
A continued thank you again for all those that have brought a snack to share. The latest word on if PPS will provide a fruit/vegetable snack this year is that we may get a fruit or vegetable for a tasting snack once a week so your continued donations are helpful. If you'd like to donate, please visit SignUpGenius to sign up. I'll serve fresh veggie/fruit snacks first and save nonperishables for when we need them. I do have small cups to put snack in so if you are buying something it is okay if it is in bulk and we will use gloves to pass them out (it doesn't have to be individually wrapped, which I know is more expensive).
Literacy: We finished our first book study with Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten. Part of our literacy curriculum is to include writing about what we are reading. At this stage in Kindergarten what I'm looking for is if students engage with the material in some way. Some will draw pictures, color them in, write pretend words or letters, copy words from other places or even ask for help and then tracing the letters. Ms. Mika and I try to make it around to everyone to get some dictation of their thinking, but we don't always make to to everyone. I didn't get a chance to send home our current writing this week, but we did work on 3 separate pieces that are all labeled as "Response Journal" as a response to our book. Look for these coming home next week.
To wrap up our study of Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten we discussed our ideas to the question: What is the Essential Meaning of this text? What is the important message the author wants to tell us? Some of our ideas were: to see lots of details in the pictures, to see what Kindergarten is like, to feel happy about what you get to do in Kindergarten even if you are nervous at first, and that everyone that comes to school is unique.
Our last Lesson (#6) was all about "reading" a piece of visual art (in this case we studied colors and shapes in the painting I and the Village by Marc Chagall in 1911). Some art historians think that the green man in the foreground is Chagall himself. Chagall often painted scenes from dreams, folktales, and his childhood home.
As we prepare for next week and the beginning of our first Full Module about our Five Senses, which includes 5 book studies, we took picture walks through the books we'll be reading:
Foundational Skills for Reading: This week we introduced two new letters, both "plane line letters"; m and n (remember, we are focusing on the lowercase letters in handwriting). We practiced the sounds they make, how to write them and also what our first 5 letters look like when we see them in typed text.
Math: This week we practiced some of the math routines that we will do during the year. We continue to notice and wonder what we see when looking at numbers, shapes, patterns; sharing our ideas with others and listening to what others are thinking. This week we worked on vocabulary like: similar, tall, short, count and even a little bit about place value. Students got to work with partners on math centers with sorting, counting, and recording their findings.
We were happily surprised to be visited by Zero the Hero who left us a nice letter and a dice game to play on our 10th day of school (9/16/24). As we count each day we are in school we discovered that on the 10th day we have to have TWO numerals to write the number; a 1 and a 0. Students are learning that the number one in the 10 is actually a ten itself with zero ones. This is a big concept that we'll continue to learn all year as we build a visual representation of it on our calendar wall each day. For example see number 12 (1 ten and 2 ones) displayed visually below:
Social Studies: This week marked the beginning of Hispanic/Latiné Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15th). We started learning about this by looking at a map, hearing the names of Latin American countries and seeing their various flags. We learned that Spanish is spoken in most of these countries, along with other languages too. We also learned that Latiné people live all over the world, not just in Latin America. Our first famous person we learned about was Cesar Chavez and the work he did to help Migrant workers alongside another famous person, Dolores Huerta. Here's a song and story we heard this week (links added):
Here are some books we enjoyed this week (links provided in case your child would like to hear them again):
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