Room 111 Kindergarten

Friday was our 38th day of Kindergarten and we've done a lot together!  We are approaching the end of the first quarter and I'm starting to prepare the first set of report cards.  At the end of November we'll have Parent/Teacher Conferences where I can share even more about how your child is doing, where there are some challenges, and how we can work together to help your child succeed.  Very soon I'll send sign-up times for conferences for Monday, November 25th and Tuesday November 26th.  

Hoyt Arboretum Field Trip:  Thank you for all you did to get your student ready for our Field Trip last Thursday.  Also, a big thank you to all the adult chaperones that helped us have a great time.  Although the arboretum was beautiful, exciting, and full of wonder, I think some students may have had just as much fun on the school bus.  I'm so proud of our class and all that we have learned about trees and about each other.

Scholastic Book Fair: A couple weeks ago Grout held the Book Fair and everyone in our class had a chance to pick out a brand new book, free of charge.  Thank you to the PTA for providing this opportunity to our students; everyone was so excited!

Garden:  Ms. Abby met with us on October 9th to teach us more about how to take care of living things, how to show gratitude to the Garden and we got to taste two different kinds of apples.  We learned about the Honorable Harvest Practices of Indigenous People and how we can carry on their traditions in our own Gardens.  Thank you for any volunteers who came out on October 23rd to make the final preparations to put the Garden to rest for the the coldest months.  

Foundational Skills in Phonological Awareness and Literacy:  So far I've introduced 15 letters (their names, lowercase letter formation, and their most common sounds:  t, b, f, m, n, i, u, c, o, a, g, d, s, e, r).  Students are using these letters and sounds to help them begin writing labels on pictures, finding items that begin with these sounds and even noticing how these letters work together to make small words like "fun", "sat", or "dog".  This work is not easy for many students in our class and takes practice.  If your child isn't confident in these letters/sounds yet, please try to practice them at home or while you are out and about in the world.  Letters are everywhere!

We are practicing finding things that start with f, b, t, n, and m in the following wordless books.  There is an adult reading part, which some students may be ready to read already, and then the student part is finding objects with these letter sounds.  After one more book students will take home their own copies of a collection of these books for them to practice at home.  When we read these books (called Geodes) we are practicing retelling the story, finding the letter sounds we've learned, and learning more about the world.  

      

Our newest letters to learn are a, g, d, s, e, and r.  Students are learning how to read the "fancy a" and "fancy g" that we so often see in printed materials so they know what those letters are, but we are learning how to write these letters by starting with our "magic c" and then continuing on to finish each letter.  The letter "s" and "e" are tricky to write because they require students to visualize the halfway space between the plane line and the grass line.  I often refer to this imaginary space as the bird line to help them understand where to start the letter "e" and where to bend the letter "s".  

          

          

           

        

We've continued learning about the five senses through our book studies; most recently looking closely at Last Stop on Market Street and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.  Ask your child if they remember what happens in these books, who are the characters, where does it take place, and why do you think the Author wrote the words they did?  What do the author and illustrator want us to know/learn after reading these books?

              

Math:  We have expanded our knowledge of positional words by also practicing how to describe things by their attributes (colors, shapes, sizes).  We are specifically working on how to talk about length (longer, shorter) and height (taller, shorter).  After learning some ways to describe things we are learning how we can sort items in many different ways.  Students work with partners and on their own to sort items in more than one way (by color, by size, by shape, by purpose, etc).  We spent last week describing and sorting rainforest animals as we discussed forests and trees leading up to our field trip.  Students took home their cards and rainforest background if you want to continue the practice at home.

Science:  We did a short unit on trees; deciduous and evergreen in preparation for our field trip and also tied into our learning about plants in Garden class.  Students discussed the differences between living and non-living things and how many things we use in our lives came from living things.

In addition to trees, students are learning about their own bodies, specifically their brains.  We are learning about the parts of our brains that make us act and respond the way we do to better understand how to self-regulate and be ready for learning and playing safe with others.  So far students have learned about the following three sections: the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), also called our Wise Owl; the Amygdala, also called our Guard Dog which protects us by helping us fight, flee, or freeze when we are in danger; and the Hippocampus, also called our Memory Saver so that we can learn from our experiences.  Most importantly students learned that if we don't take action our brain will only make decisions by fighting, running away, or freezing instead of thinking about the situation and using our words to solve problems.  If we recognize this, we can take a deep breath or take a moment to let our PFC help us make decisions.  This is a complex subject, but I find that students enjoy learning why they sometimes act how they act, feel how they feel, or see what others do.  The images below are links to learn more about what we are learning in class.  We did not listen to these links in class, but they are from the same curriculum. 

 

 

In addition to learning about our brains we are learning about feelings and how to use an "I feel" statement when talking through problems.  I've been showing students short videos of real kids working on this skill and then we practice it in our classroom.  Here is one of the videos we've watched in class: