Happy New Year! I hope your year is off to a great start!
The children were certainly happy to see each other when they came back on Wednesday. We passed the Talking Carrot to share something we did over the Winter Break. We focused on listening to others and speaking in complete sentences. Then we read an interesting book called Shante Keys and the New Year's Peas, by Gail Piernas-Davenport. The story is about a family that is preparing for their New Year's celebration with their traditional foods; black-eyed peas, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, baked ham and corn bread. But the family soon finds out they forgot to buy the black-eyed peas, or cow beans as they are also called. It's bad luck not to eat black-eyed peas for New Years, so Shante goes to her neighbors to see if they have any black-eyed peas. We learned about the different foods other cultures have for New Year's as Shante goes door to door. We talked about what a resolution is and came up with three resolutions for 2024. One resolution was for home, one for wellness, and one for school. I will send these home next week. We broke this down into parts so we could be thoughtful as we determined an appropriate resolution for each part. This week we also read about what animals need in Benchmark. Ask me to tell you what animals need to survive. We talked about what a topic is, and we closely examined different text features as we read. The children wrote a key detail from the book that supported the topic of what animals need to survive. We focused on starting the sentence with a capital letter, putting spaces between words, ending the sentence with punctuation and spelling any Heart Words in the sentence correctly. We continued to work with this topic and read an information book that gave us a lot more information about what foods animals eat. The children will write more about animals and the food they eat to survive next week. We also listened to a story about hummingbirds. Ask me to pound out the syllables for hummingbirds then spell this 12 letter word! We did not look at pictures for this story but instead used the strategy of visualization to remember key details in this story. We used our doodle journals to draw quick pictures and write a couple words to remind us the important details of the story. Ask me to tell you what I learned about hummingbirds and what I drew in my doodle journal. In math we worked more with balance scales and counting. We will continue to practice measuring length, height, weight and will learn about capacity next week. We also practiced reading nonsense words. I will be reviewing this with children before we do the next Dibels test. What I have noticed with some of the children is that they are trying to make sense of the words, and that when the word doesn't sound right using the sounds of the letters they are reading, they substitute a real word. Their brain seems to naturally do that although we need to "prove" they are not guessing, so nonsense words are used to measure what they know about the sounds and letters. We will practice this a few more times just to help them understand it is okay if the word sounds funny and to not change it to a word they know. I hope that made sense!!! We read a great book this week called Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, by Christine Baldacchino. Morris is a little boy who loves to wear a tangerine dress that is in the dress up corner at school. He also likes to wear some of the different shoes. Soon he is teased by other children about a boy wearing a dress and he is left out of activities and teased by the other children. It upsets him so much that his stomach hurts. We stopped reading the story at this point and talked about what Morris could do about his problem. We brainstormed good solutions as well as solutions that were not so good. We turned and talked to a buddy about what they thought Morris should do. In the story, Morris tells his mom his stomach hurts, and he stays in bed for a day instead of going to school. On the weekend he feels better and paints a picture that shows Morris on an elephant in the tangerine dress. Morris shows his mom the picture and tells her about the dress he wears that is tangerine and that reminds him of his mother's hair. He tells her how it swishes like an elephant, his favorite animal, walking through grasses, and how the clicking of the shoes he wears reminds him tigers teeth as they eat giant leaves. His mother understands what is happening, and Morris feels more secure in being who he is and is ready to go back to the school on Monday. We talked about how important it is to share your worries and problems with others, like your family, teachers or anyone else you are close to that can help you. We also talked about how important it is to accept others and let them be who they want to be. The children have started giving books ratings. This one got a 10/10, and a few other incredible ratings. Often I think they give ratings to books because I think they think that's what I want them to do, but I do think they liked this book. Taking time to read part of the book, then continue with the book later in the day after reviewing the first part is a great way to get kids to think more deeply about the book and not be overwhelmed with a story that gives them a lot to think about. I hope you have a great weekend! We started the week with kids talking about snow coming for the weekend, but I'm afraid those snowmen they were planning to build will have to wait! They had a hard time understanding that the winter break being over didn't mean that winter was over! ~Miss Wolfe Shante Keys and the New Year's Peas Gail Piernas-Davenport
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rIt's been a busy week! This week we have been working on the Chromebooks. The children are getting better with logging on independently, but some children still need help. We have many children who can help now! The children are learning to navigate to the RGR site to work on the Playground. They are also learning how to get to our Google classrooms. We will be using two Google classrooms. One will have activities to support and give students additional practice with what we are doing in the classroom. We also have a Read the U.S.A. classroom that will be used to follow up on read alouds we do for the rest of the year that will take us to every state and the District of Columbia. You will hear more about that tomorrow. Later we will be adding some additional sites.
In math, we have started a new unit in measurement. The children will enjoy this unit with many hands-on activities. We are also learning about teen numbers, and numbers greater than 20 as well. In Benchmark, we have been going through the writing process to write an additional event or ending to the story The Little Red Hen. We learned about brainstorming, planning, and writing a draft. We will work to fix up our writing, focusing on spaces between words, a period at the end of a sentence, and a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence. In our Social Emotional Learning, we began talking about what it means to be a bystander and an upstander. We got to the bystander part, but tomorrow will focus on how to be an upstander. In school, while learning to be part of a group, children have to learn what to do when someone is hurting them or others. We can use DeBug for kid-size problems, and we can get adult help when we have been hurt or the problem was too big, but we also need to learn what to do so we are not in those situations. This is not easy and it doesn't happened over night, but we can learn to be more confident and persistent in asking for help. Today we talked about being a bystander. A bystander is watching what is going on and can go and report situations where someone is being hurt physically, intentionally left out repeatedly, or inappropriate language, comments or names are being used. When a bystander tells an adult about these situations it is reporting, not tattling, and the response of the adult will be to follow-through with a consequence as necessary. We read a story called Super Many Stands Up, by Kelly DiPUcchio. This story is about Manny who likes to pretend he is a superhero at home. He has different color capes he uses for saving the world different villains. At school he has an invisible cape, and when one of the characters is bullied, Manny stands up to stop it. When Manny stands up, others do as well, and the bully loses his power over the group. Manny was an upstander. Tomorrow we will learn more about being an upstander and what it is and isn't. We will practice walking, talking and showing confidence in our own inner strength by our body language. This is all part of building a stronger community that does not tolerate fighting, exclusion, teasing, and inappropriate language. These lessons are not one and done; they are lessons that will be repeated and that we will check-in with students to be sure they are being heard, supported, and that they feel safe. It's also important to know that the children who are behaving in an inappropriate way are getting the support they need to learn how to be part of a group and to get help in handling their own emotions and situations that led to their inappropriate behavior. I really stressed to the children that they do not have to feel alone and that their classmates are here to support them, as well as the adults at the school. As we are approaching the holidays, we are seeing more emotional responses to situations. The children are chattier, sillier, and more easily upset over little things. This happens during times when there will be a transition to a break, around holidays and birthdays, and when the snow comes! We are going to maintain our routines, take a few more brain breaks, and engage in some mindfulness lessons and activities to help with managing those emotions. I will be sending information over the weekend about putting together a calm-down box which you might want to put together for your children in handling those strong emotions of happiness, disappointment, anger, etc. or times when your child just needs to take a break to be proactive so they do not get to a point where they are overstimulated and make poor choices. Grown-ups can use the tools in the calm down box too! I broke into the calm-down kit at my desk today when I had to ask six times to speak to a person when I called Comcast. I probably confused the robot because after asking to speak to a human or agent four times, I accidentally started saying I needed to speak to a grown up. That's when I broke into the calm down kit and grabbed a squishy. It helped. I was able to talk calmly to the human they finally connected me with to fix my problem who was indeed, a grown-up. Have a nice evening! Miss Wolfe We started our day by looking at these unusual landforms. We continued working on questioning, and sure had a lot of questions about these geysers. We took a peek at the webcam at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. The National Parks have webcams you can view to see what is going on in different parts of the parks. We watched but didn't see Old Faithful erupt, but we did watch a short video clip so we could see just what happens with geysers. If you would like to take a peek at Old Faithful and see what she's up to, here's the link: www.nps.gov/yell/learn/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm We played the game "I Have a Gift for You." This is a theater game that helps children develop their theory of mind, their ability to recognize others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions and thoughts, and to begin to understand that they may be different from their own. This is a game we began today but will return to often to help develop these understandings more. Today we thought about what the person sitting to the right of us likes and might like to receive as a gift. The children were encouraged to dramatically hold the pretend item and pass it to the next person, telling them what it is using descriptive language. We'll work on that more! We also worked to use a "loud and proud" voice so that everyone in the room could hear them. The other person acknowledged the gift and we moved on to the next person. As we continue to play this game over time, I hope to see fewer puppies and kittens being given as gifts. The last child to give a gift was practical and just gave the child to his right $20! Ask me to tell you what imaginary gift I gave.
The Social Emotional school-wide topic for December is diversity. We got a little headstart today and read the book Snippets: A Story About Paper Shapes, by Diane Alber. This story is about a little shape named Snippet who is an irregular polygon. He notices the houses are all just squares and triangles, exactly the same except in color. Snippet has an irregular shape so is directed to go jump in the pile of irregular shapes because he cannot be part of the other homes. Ask me to tell you what happens when Snippet joins the pile. I introduced this story talking about diversity and what it is, and by introducing the word race and racism. We had a very short talk about how groups can leave others out they perceive to be not good enough to be in their community. We did more writing today. I encouraged the children to write two sentences about their favorite type of weather. The first sentence was to identify the type of weather, and the second sentence was to tell what they do in the weather. I modeled writing about my favorite weather, reminding them to put spaces between their words, start their sentence with a capital letter, and end the sentence with punctuation. They did a nice job and will work more on this piece tomorrow. We also learned about temperature in science. We will be recording the weather each day starting next week. The children will have weekly calendars and one of our recordings will be the temperature. We had indoor recess today due to the cold, so I'm hoping tomorrow will be a little warmer so the kids can get outside. Have a nice evening! Miss Wolfe It's been a busy two days! We took a "field trip" out west to visit landforms. This beautiful video reminded us that landforms are made by nature not humans. In this video human-made things are only shown three times. We learned about hoodoos and slot canyons, and found out that erosion formed many of the amazing landforms we studied. We also know rivers change the land as well and saw beautiful bird's eye views of rivers. Watch with me and ask me about the landforms in the video! Tuesday for our Picture Talk, we studied this amazing landform. We are working on asking questions, and we certainly had a lot we wondered about when we saw this photo. This might look like a sphere, which would have been so great since we are studying solid shapes, but the other side of it is not round. Today in our Benchmark reading, we listened to a short version of The Three Bears. We answered a text dependent question, or "right there question" which was about how the author described the characters. The story is so short but the perfect way to introduce and practice finding in the text what the author says and only writing that. The children could not add any ideas of their own or included what they saw in the illustration because of the prompt. So their response was short, which made it a perfect opportunity to practice putting spaces between words and working toward using lower case letters except when starting the sentence or for a character's name.
In math, we described and named solid shapes. We learned the geometry vocabulary words edge, corner, base and face. Although we do not study all these shapes in Eureka, we talked about spheres, cones, cubes, rectangular prisms, triangular prisms, cylinders and pyramids. The children did an amazing job remembering and pronouncing the names of the shapes. We are still working on pronouncing sphere! Have a nice evening! Miss Wolfe Yesterday I made a shocking discovery. Most of the class DOES NOT like mashed potatoes. I really was surprised. So I decided I would have my own, pretend, Thanksgiving Dinner with the kids. They had to use their manners and ask for one of the delicious dishes from above. Then they had to give a compliment when finished. You will be happy to know they all passed the manners test and are ready for a proper Thanksgiving!
I hope you and your family have a relaxing, fun and safe Thanksgiving! Miss Wolfe We started our day by studying photographs of a pow wow. We listened to the story Jingle Dancer, by Cynthia Leitich Smith. The book is about a modern day Muscogee girl who wants to dance at the pow wow, but needs jingles for her dress. She asks different family members and friends for jingles and honors them by dancing at the pow wow. We watched a couple videos that showed how to do the jingle dance, as well as other Native American dances. We also listened to the story Please Mr. Panda, by Steve Antony. This is the story of a panda who offers donuts to different animals who say they want the donuts, but do not say please. Ask me to tell you who gets the donuts at the end of the story. We talked about using manners and practiced saying please to ask for food that would be served at Thanksgiving. We also talked about saying thank-you, and responding when people say good morning to them. Let's give this YouTube video below some love. Ms. Lillis, Mrs. Jackson and Mr. Sheets performed the Koo Koo Milkshake song. They are wearing the costumes they wore for Halloween. We LOVED the video! Have a great weekend!
Miss Wolfe We started our day by analyzing four different maps. We studied them and compared them to see how they were the same and different. Ask me to tell you about one of the maps. We listened to the Tortoise and the Hare story again today. We listened closely to learn about the main characters. The Benchmark version of this story is very short, but we learned a lot about tortoise. Then we wrote together. We worked on describing one of the characters in the story. We chose tortoise. We wrote together with the children helping to tap out the words with guidance. I emphasized putting spaces between the words, upper and lower case letters, and starting the sentence with a capital letter. That's a lot! I wouldn't expect kinders at this point in the year to all be able to do those things as they write, and when they write independently, the focus would be on on convention of writing,, but because I was writing on the screen with them, I pointed out all these conventions.
We reviewed what the lesson in the story is, and I directed them to listen closely to the end of fables for the lesson. Ask me to tell you the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. Have a nice evening! Miss Wolfe We read The Tortoise and the Hare and wondered how tortoises and turtles are the same and different. Ask me to tell you what I found out. We watched this special video about bullying. We noticed who the bully was right away, and saw that he tried to get the other birds to go along with him. We will talk more about bullying after Thanksgiving and learn how to be an upstander.
Have a nice evening! Miss Wolfe Today we started our day looking at three paintings by Paul Klee. We looked at how Klee used shapes to create interesting paintings. We talked with a buddy about what we noticed and which painting was our favorite.
We listened to the story The Hare and the Tortoise. We talked about how this was a special kind of story called a fable. Fables teach a lesson. Ask me to tell you what the lesson was in this story. We also began to work on retelling the story. In math we continued talking about shapes. We looked at shapes in different orientations to determine what shape they were by thinking about the definitions of the shape. We talked again about straight lines, curves, corners or angles, and closed or open shapes. In Social Studies we began talking about geography. We learned about maps and globes today. Have a nice evening! Miss Wolfe We started our day studying photographs of the celebration of Diwali. We watched a short video to learn more about this holiday, then read a book called The LIght Within You, by Namita Moolani Mehra. The Light Within You is a beautiful story of a little girl's love for her grandmother who lives in India. It's a beautiful story about know who you are and being confident which lets the light inside you shine for others to see.
In Really Great Reading, we started learning three Heart Words. We learned how to look at the word, spell it out loud, and how to tap from their shoulder, to the inside of their elbow, to their wrist as they spell the words. We looked at the tricky parts of the words to know these are the parts we are to memorize. We learned how to listen to dictated words and finger stretch them, then write the letter that goes with the sound down. We did this together, but in the future I will spread the children out so I can see what they can do on their own. We also took a quick sound test for one of the units in Really Great Reading. In math, we began working with shapes. Today we were looking at a variety of shapes to determine if they had a curve or not. This was tricky for some of the children who looked at shapes such as a hexagon and considered it's shape a curve. I also think the poor format of the workbook page made the children think they had to place the shapes evening on the T-chart. A big part of our geometry instruction is learning vocabulary to identify and compare shapes. Have a nice evening! Miss Wolfe |
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