Oak Room Newsletter
Week of November 10, 2014
This week (as told by the Oak Room Kindergartners)...
We had Michelle and Brooke for a few days in Sustainability.
Sara from Studio in a School visited us. We made collages and practiced using scissors.
We made labels for our book bins that we organized.
We played with drums, shakers, and boom wackers in Music.
We have been reading a poem about mice. We underlined the words we knew in the poem.
We started a book about the community garden. We drew what we saw in the garden.
We talked about the Square Table list and how only one name should go on each line.
This week in literacy (and things to do at home)
In Writing Workshop we are working on a book about the community garden. We took photos on our visits and brainstormed different parts of the garden that we want to teach others about. It is a preview of our next writing unit, "Looking closely: observing, listing, and labeling like scientists."
In word study we worked on the letters G and T. We sorted pictures that started with the letter sounds and practiced in our handwriting books.
Things to do at home
When reading with your child, ask your child to point out the characters in the story. After reading a story, ask your child to retell what happened in the beginning, middle, and end. After reading a story, ask your child to explain the problem and the solution.
Review the letter sounds for the following letters that we have formally learned in Word Study: C, D, G, M, R, T
This week in math (and things to do at home)
This week we revisited the Counting Jar. This time the children had to work independently to count the items in a jar, make a matching set, and represent that set through numbers and symbols.
We also started number stories. The children listen to a story involving a mathematical question and have to solve the problem using math tools and then represent how they solved it. For example, this week's number story was "Pascale had 5 leaves, Lorna gave her 7 more. How many leaves does Pascale have now?"
We started a new game called Grab & Count. The children have to grab a handful of objects with one hand, count the objects, then show how many there were through pictures and numbers.
Things to do at home
Practice counting things! Keep an eye out to make sure your child touches/points to each object once and only once, and only says one number for each object.
THANK YOU Cleaning Crew!!!!
We just want to give a big huge THANK YOU to Johanna and the rest of the cleaning crew for organizing and helping out to keeping our room clean!!!! It makes a HUGE difference and we are SO SO SO grateful!