We enjoyed another story about a character we read about earlier in the year named Yoko.  Today we read Yoko's Show and Tell, by Rosemary Wells.  We were listening to learn more about the main characters in the story.  Ask me to tell you about Yoko and the Franks. ​We were working on thinking of three words to describe each character.  We are working to think more deeply than just what they look like, so we thought about their character and actions in the story.  Then, we picked a fiction book and drew a picture of one of the characters, then drew three little pictures or wrote a word, or did both, to describe the character we chose.  This is building on what we did earlier in the year, which is what Benchmark does all year.  The lessons build on each other and spiral throughout the year. 
We are working on building a strong memory.  We have been working on answering questions in complete sentences from our Really Great Reading, but I've been surprised at how many children need reminders about the name of the character in the little story.  It changes every day with every story, but the name is in the story many times, then we all answer the first 12ish questions together, but when the children have to answer on their own, they might forget the character's name.  To building that memory strength, we played a memory game.  I flashed nine pictures on the screen for 45 seconds.  Then the children went back and quickly sketched all the items they remembered.  I organized the pictures on a grid which I thought might make it easier for them to remember or use a strategy to remember.  Here's the picture the children studied:

I talked to the children about only using a pencil and just sketching the pictures.  I chose mostly pictures that would be important to the kids.  We talked about not coloring or adding a lot of details to these, but to get the pictures drawn so they could remember as many as possible. Ask me to show you my Memory paper!

In math, some of our students acted out a story.  We were working with a group of ten and were looking for hidden partners in our story.  The actors and the audience enjoyed themselves!  The highlight of the story was when one of our actors ad-libbed as we sang Happy Birthday.  I neglected to tell the actors and audience the name of the character whose birthday party our actors were going to, so when we got to "Happy birthday dear..." and one of the actors sang "random birthday kid." 
We learned about the /y/ sound today.  Ask me to yodel!

Have a great weekend!
Miss Wolfe

Just a quick update today!  We were talking about making text-to-self connections today.  We watched a story on Storyline, which I will link below, that was about friendship.  The book read was Chester's Way, by Kevin Henkes.  We stopped along the way to talk about what was happening in the story and if we were making any connections.  We know that we will not have a text-to-self connection with every book, but many children were able to relate to friends doing the same things, which was a big part of this book.  Another important lesson from the book is that you need to get to know someone before you know if they might be a friend for you.  We talked about making snap decisions based on what someone looks like.  
Your child is bringing home an index card with a connection they made, or a picture of their favorite part of the story.  Ask me to tell you about my picture.  Also, ask me to show you how we say text-to-self connection with our hands.

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Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

We started our day by analyzing these five photographs.  The children noticed the lights first, then later on the darkness.  We watched a short video from National Geographic about Diwali.  
We are moving along in Really Great Reading.  We are almost done with the first Unit about sounds.  We worked on blending today, peeling off the first sound, and the /h/ sound.  Ask me to tell you what my mouth does when I made the /h/ sound.
We listened to a silly story called George Washington's Cows, by David Small.  George Washington's animals did some amazing things, or did they?  Ask me to tell you about the animals and what they did.  
We read a short biography about George Washington.  We compared the three books we have read and decided whether they were fiction, non-fiction or a little of both.  
In math, we practiced counting-on going forward and backward.  We also used ten frames to show different ways to make groups of 6-9.  

We had a great day!  
​Miss Wolfe

We had a great visit with our Bear Buddies.  We will be meeting with them once a month to build relationships.  We are paired with Ms. Barber's third grade class.  Today both our classes had  four kids out so we did not pair the children up with buddies, but instead got to know each other less structured.  We colored Scarecrow Glyphs that we will display in the hallway.  I didn't have my camera today, but I'll bring it tomorrow and take some quick photos of the children with their glyph.  I know we are going to enjoy pairing up with Ms. Barber's class.  
We got more children on Chromebooks today using the Really Great Reading Playground.  
We read a poem about a scarecrow today.  We learned about verbs.  Ask me to tell you some of the verbs in the poem.  The children also drew three more verbs at the bottom of the page and a scarecrow on the back of the poem.  We took a little trip back to the seventies and watched School House Rock to learn about verbs.  I'm also posting the noun School House Rock as well because I think it's one I wasn't able to post when I had trouble posting on Weebly.  Enjoy!

Have a great evening!
​Miss Wolfe

We spent some time with one small group today getting on to the Really Great Reading Playground.  This site offers the children a variety of games to play by the units we are studying.  We had to ask for help about logging on and luckily it was a quick fix.  The thing that took our friends the longest was logging on so if you still have the paper keyboard, please have your child practice logging on so they don't lose time working on the website because they are taking a long time to log on.  I'll be pulling two more groups tomorrow I hope to get started.  The good thing is I have a few friends who will be able to help other children know what to do so they can help each other.  This class LOVES working as a team.  
We talked more about leaders today, specifically presidents.  We learned about George Washington.  Ask me to tell you something I learned about George Washington.  
We worked more with counting accuracy and determining a counting path.  We talked about circular groups and that thinking about the circle as a clock and starting the count at 1 and stopping at the top where the 12 would be is a good way to remember where you started.  We are working on accuracy so being sure they don't skip an item or count it twice is important.  We continued to work with scattered groups.  
Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

We started our day by studying a couple photographs of bats.  We continue to talk about what we notice and practice asking questions about what we wonder.  Later in the day, we read parts of a non-fiction text from National Geographic and had some of our questions answered.  We used the text to learn more about text features.  We had previously talked about captions and labels, so today we talked about headings, the table of contents, and the glossary.  We also touched on bold print, although the text I used today did not have bold print.  The students then went to the classroom library to find a non-fiction text.  We still are working on identifying those texts.  Then we worked with a partner and shared our books to find text features.  
We had a visit from Mrs. Kemp to talk about behavior in the cafeteria.  She visited all the kindergarten classrooms, so we were not singled out.  In fact, after lunch today she complimented our class not only on their behavior in the cafeteria, but on how quietly they walked down the hall.  I'm so proud of this group and how well they work together.
In math, we worked more with 5 groups.  Five is a really important number in building number sense.  We are moving a little faster now that routines are established and testing done, so we will be adding a math station time to our afternoon.  Tomorrow we are going to have a little extra math time and will be learning some games that can be played during that time.  Some of the games will be to reinforce skills or challenge, and others will be strategy games.
We finished our Read the USA suitcases today.  We are working hard on cutting neatly.  We need to be sure the children are holding the scissors the correct way with thumb on top.  We also are working to turn the papers as they cut instead of turning their hand.  We also are learning to have a strategy when we cut out smaller items from a big piece of paper.  I'm trying to get the children to cut around the items first so they are trimming a smaller piece and can control it better than trying to do that with a full size sheet of paper.  We also used glue sticks today so we worked on making sure we got the edges glued and smoothing them out on the suitcase so it stays down.  They did pretty well and had a great time.  They are so excited about their suitcases, although there was a little disappointment from a few that it was not a "real" suitcase.  They will be bringing home several postcards this week I hope!  

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

Today we read a great "spooky" story today called The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything, by Linda Williams.  This is a story the children love to join in to tell, and it's a really great story to work with identifying events in a story.  We will work more with the story tomorrow, but today we made puppets to practice retelling.  I have included a YouTube video of the story so the children can tell you the story then you can watch together to see how they did!  Enjoy!

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

We had a great day.  We worked with the /g/ and sound blending sounds to make a words,  Today we had our Eureka Plus time.  These are not Eureka activities, but challenges that we are using suggested by our staff development teacher Mr. Fenton as well as others our team has found.  We plan to do these every other Friday, or more often.  Many of them we will be putting into our math station that we hope to begin using next week when we finish our Eureka lessons.  Today's challenge was called Chain of Changes.  To play you need 12 shapes of different colors.  You start the game with one shape, then the next shape has to be the same but will be a different color.  The shape after that needs to be the same color but a different shape.  The game continues until you don't have a piece that fits the pattern.  With games like this, it's important to play them several times so the children can develop a strategy.  We will play this again as a class sometime soon to see what they have discovered.   Here are a few pictures of pairs of children, and one trio, playing this fun game.

We studied different spiders this morning for our Picture Talk.  We are working to look more closely to see details.  We also are analyzing, so we are looking for similarities and differences as well as how the parts all come together.

We used our Boxlight to create a pictograph to find out which spider most kids liked best.  We do not have a lot of graphing in our Eureka, but it does come up on the MAP P, so we like to add that in to our curriculum when we can.  We talked about making sure we line up the bear faces so we can look at our data and easily see how many there are in each row.  We can also compare easier to find out which had the most, fewest, and also how many more between the spiders.  

We didn't have time to work on our Read the USA suitcases, so we hope to try and do that Monday.  We did visit our first state.  We began our journey across the USA in Oklahoma where Woody Guthrie was born.  We listened to Woody sing Riding in My Car and enjoyed the pop-up book.  Careful, this one gets stuck in your head.

Then we listened to ALL the verses of This Land is Your Land.  The children will soon be learning the first verse of this song.  This book will be in our Read the USA basket so the children can see all the pictures from all over our beautiful country.

I hope you have time this weekend to enjoy the beautiful fall weather!
​Miss Wolfe

We started our day by practicing our questioning.  We know questions often start with words like who, what, where, when, why, how, and can.  We studied the first photo and asked questions to help ourselves understand what was happening in the photo.  We took a closer look at the pumpkins that were being grown in this unusual way and found a few surprises!
We read a poem about growing pumpkins and illustrated the first part and the last part.  Ask me to show you my illustrations.
We worked with the /p/ sound today.  We also practiced naming real and creating nonsense words that rhyme.  We know we have to listen closely when rhyming, especially to that ending sound.
In Benchmark Reading, we learned about comparing and contrasting two texts.  We used two texts we had previously read and found how they are the same and how they are different.
In math we worked with five sticks and ten frames.  We showed different numbers using the ten frame in different ways.  We also dug a little deeper and worked with determining how many more to make ten.
In Social Studies, we talked about leaders.  We looked through two series of pictures that illustrated people and animals being leaders.  Then we looked at some leaders we will be learning more about next week.
We also started working on creating a suitcase for postcards we will be collecting as we Read the USA.  Tomorrow we will start on our journey, and HOPEFULLY this year, we will make it to all 50 states.  
Today was the best day so far, and I think they have all be good!  Most of the children followed our routines on their own without reminders, they cleaned up at lunch I think mostly on their own, walked in the hallways quietly, and were respectful.  Ask me to tell you about our special brain break today!

Have a nice weekend!
Miss Wolfe