January 03rd, 2019

We continued working with short and long vowels today.  We focused on the long and short i using Maurice Sendak's book Chicken Soup With Rice.  We looked at the poem for January from the book and found long and short vowel i's in the poem.  We also drew a picture and labeled five things in the picture.  Carole King put music to this book and turned it into a musical, so we listened and sang along to the story.  It's a fun book about each of the seasons, and of course, chicken soup with rice.  Here's a link with the book and the amazing Carole King singing Chicken Soup with Rice.   

In math, we worked with addition and subtraction story problems.  It's hard trying to teach the strategies for problem solving when the kids are so quick in knowing the answers without using the strategies!  We are working on the process of problem solving, so it's important first that the children are listening to find out what the problem is asking.  Then they need to be able to find the important details in the problem they need to solve it.  They need to know which operations to use, although we are not using addition and subtraction, plus or minus, right now, we are talking about joining groups or taking apart groups.  For the most part, this was also very easy for many of the children, so we will be doing some small group work and use larger numbers for groups who are ready for it.  Today we used two strategies for problem solving; we acted out some problems, and used manipulatives for some problems.  With manipulatives, the children need to learn to be organized about using their counters.  They need to be sure to count out the right number and put away extras so they are not mixed up in their problem solving.  For many kindergarteners, the organizing part of problem solving is often the tricky part.  The other part is that they need to use the counters as counters, not as toys or art projects.  By that I mean it doesn't matter the color or type of counter, and it does not need a fancy arrangement.  We worked on learning about that process so as problems become trickier with larger amounts or more difficult types of problems that their focus can be on the counting and using the correct operation.  
We also continued to practice skip counting by 2's, 5's and 10's.  We took a look at how counting by fives is important in using tally marks.

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe