October 17th- October 21st
Adventures in Learning
A Note From Ms. Herter!
I love my time with the kinders in B-4...what an amazing group of children they are...all the credit goes to you parents! We are going to be making turkey tee shirts to wear for Thanksgiving. Please send in a white tee shirt (it can be long-sleeved) with your kinder's name on the label or the back of the collar no later than Friday, November 11. I CAN'T WAIT TO MAKE THESE...IT'S MY FAVORITE PROJECT OF THE YEAR! If you have any questions, don't hesitate to let me know. The whole class will also be wearing their tee shirts on Tuesday, November 22!
Reading
Reading WorkShop
This week we will start working on our Sight Word Books. Just like the Alpha Box Books, students will write/collect sight words they find in their books. Sight words are the words that are found in a repeating pattern in a book. For example, I see the black cat; I see the grey dog; I see the white bird. "I", "see", and "the" are sight words. We will write these words in our books and study them when we are working in small reading groups.
Writing
Writing Workshop
We are starting a new unit in writing called "Looking Closely." This unit is all about becoming a scientist and looking closely at a collection of objects. One main purpose behind this unit is to get student writing words and writing legible words. We are combining this writing unit with our PBL with the acorns.
Van Hiele's Levels of Geometric Understanding
This is some heavy stuff! If you remember all the way back to parent night I mentioned Mr. van Heile and his thoughts about the development of geometric understanding. Though the actual number of levels is still contested, there are at least 5 main levels of understanding. The first level is visualization and, to put it simply, this stage is all about seeing to believe. Students have to work with the concrete shapes to learn before any abstract thinking about shapes can occur. If you click on the bold MATH heading, I included a link to a breakdown of van Heile's levels if you would like to dive deeper into geometry. I bring all of this up because of the work we are doing in math. We are working with pattern block shape puzzles.
PBL
Collections
We are combining our PBL and writing units for the next four weeks. With Looking Closely, we will be collecting natural objects. We already had a start with this in our acorn collection. Since collecting our acorns, we have expanded our collection to natural objects found around Evamere. Our guiding question for this PBL is, "How can we write books to teach someone everything we know about _______?" We have collected some leaves around Evamere. Though because of the great groundskeeping we have, there is hardly a leaf to be had! So this weekend I am asking students and families to go out and collect some more leaves! We will use these leaves in our writing and PBL units.
Mr. Shaw
Email: shawj@hudson.edu
Website: http://www.hudson.k12.oh.us/Domain/1240
Location: 76 North Hayden Parkway, Hudson, OH, United States
Phone: (330) 653-1226
Twitter: @adventuresofb4