ask me about thursday, October 12, 2023

I am working hard to get every child participating in our Picture Talk each day.  Today I tempted them with these goodies!  We studied the donuts to notice what the toppings were, and talked with our partner/s about which donut we would choose and why.  We also worked on using the top, middle, bottom, as well as ordinal numbers first, second, third and fourth to describe where the donut is we would like.  We had a lot of children eager to talk about these donuts.  There has been a lot more participation in Picture Talk since the beginning of the year, but I wanted to really entice those reluctant children to join in, and this definitely worked!  I might just try it with vegetables tomorrow!
We worked with responding to a story today by writing about a friend.  In Kindergarten, writing at this point in the year is often a detailed picture that tells a story, possibly letters being used to represent their idea, or a sentence dictated by the student and written by the teacher.  When we work with writing, we sketch with pencil and do not use crayons until we have fixed up our writing.  Using a pencil gives students a better opportunity to include details instead of trying to do that with crayons.  I also have students just make an x over mistakes instead of spending time erasing.  I shared with them that their mistakes are a part of learning, and that teachers love to see that they caught their mistake and fixed it up.  We will continue to do more writing, build confidence so that the children will begin to get letters down that represent sounds and share their stories with others.  
In math we worked with writing numbers in order counting forward and backward, practiced subitizing, and worked with decomposing quantities.  A big part of Eureka math is following directions on the papers they do.  I have many children skipping parts of the workbook page or not following the directions.  There are often a couple sets of directions for a page, but I go over and over the directions and often model what they need to do.  We are really taking time to listen and to use our fingers to countdown the steps we need to follow when completing work.  

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe