Ask me about Wed. and Thurs. Feb 9 & 10

I had a long post all ready to publish yesterday and pressed the wrong button and it all disappeared except for our Talk Time photos.  GRRRRR.  Here we go again.  We have moved to reading about the past after a brief look at science fiction and the future.  We studied these photos and talked about how school is different now than long ago.  It was almost unanimous that students would rather go to school now than in the past.  I'm pretty sure the "shed" they saw in the pictures had something to do with it.  We talked about the lack of plumbing and the wood stoves in the classrooms.  They were also overwhelmed with how many children were in the classes.  Me too!  Ask me to tell you about school long ago!
This is Black History Month, and in honor of the month, we are learning about several notable black Americans who continue to inspire us.  We started the month learning about Ruby Bridges.  We continued by reading a beautiful book by Jacqueline Woodson called The Year We Learned to Fly.  This book!  I love this book because it is gentle and inspiring.  Two children are taught to use their imagination to lift themselves up out of boredom and anger, like their ancestors before them who came here in chains on ships, to imagine a better world.  We then talked about the people we will be learning about the rest of the month.  I'm including the people I selected in the slides below, although Ruby Bridges is not in the show.  She is now on our board, but somehow got left out of the original set I printed.  

We will be reading African folktales this month as well.  Yesterday we read Abiyoyo, by Pete Seeger.  This book is always a favorite!  It has a little tune that just might get stuck in your head if you ask your child about this book.  They probably will just start singing!  We used fractions to help us draw the giant Abiyoyo after we listened to the story.  We folded and divided our tall paper into four equal parts.  We studied a picture from the book of Abiyoyo and drew it on the paper.  Then we added a setting.  Although we do not study fractions in kindergarten, some of the children encounter questions about fractions on MAP P, the standardized test we take three times a year.  We actually just took that again on Tuesday afternoon.  I emphasized that fractions are equal parts, so we looked at the paper to see that when we folded carefully matching corners and edges, each part was the same size.  
We learned about bar graphs yesterday as well.  We looked at a collection of items, then made a graph that showed how many of each item was in the collection.  Graphing isn't really covered in our Eureka curriculum, but again comes up on MAP-P, so when I can, I give the children an opportunity to learn about graphs.  We will do more soon with looking at the data on a graph and talking about what it shows.
In math today we worked more with number bonds.  We looked at number bonds in different orientations, created number bonds with pictures then numbers, and finally wrote a number sentence that tells about the number bond.
So many exciting things happen in the month of February, especially this year with the Olympics!  We took a little time to compare different types of skating.  We took a look at Nathan Chen's performance last night and watched the medal ceremony.  

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe
​