Ask Me About January 11th and 12th, 2016

We are enjoying having mealworms in our classroom.  Over the weekend they ate all the apple pieces we left for them, except for the skin of the apple.  We noticed that our mealworms are very wiggly most of the time.  Some of them have begun to molt.  Ask me what molting means.  This video below will help me remember if I forget.  This is a very cool video that shows on mealworm molting then beginning to change to a beetle.  

Today we had a class meeting to discuss a problem we have been having in our class.  Some children are getting very "wound up" and running or moving unsafely around the room.  There also seems to be a competition to be first in line for everything.  During clean up times, some children are rushing around to put things away, often throwing them into the boxes or trying to help carry a box when it already has some who is able to carry it on their own.  We talked about being safe in the class, but also slowing down.  The children know when I remind them to "cool their jets" they need to slow down.  We know that sometimes our engines get running to fast and we make unsafe choices.  In fact, a few kids have bumped heads or into each other because they were rushing around so much.  We read a great story about three friends, a beaver, a bear, and a moose, who had a similar problem.  The story Walk on the Wild Side, by Nicholas Oldland is a fable-type story that teaches the lesson that slowing down and not making everything you do a competition is important.  Ask me to tell you about the problems these characters had when they were racing up the mountain.
We have been working with breaking numbers apart in math.  Ask me to tell you what decomposition means.  We know there are different ways to make each number.  We used beans yesterday and mittens today to break numbers into parts.
We have finished our reading testing for midyear.  The children are doing a great job and moving right along.  
We have been working to write simple, little words faster so they don't slow us down in our writing.  We have been working with short vowel sounds for a and o.  We are doing a great job of writing lots of words fast with these two sounds.  We also worked on our Word Wall words for this week.  This week, said is one of our word wall words, and probably one of the trickiest on the kindergarten word wall because it doesn't follow the rules!  We know we need to practice the middle part of this word a lot because it's the trickiest part since it doesn't look like it sounds.

Twenty three little people left this room today hoping to see some white flakes falling from the sky.  I'm afraid they will be disappointed when they find they have little or nothing to make a snowman with this time!

Have a nice evening!
Juliet
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