Ask Me About Tuesday, October 1, 2019

We started our day with a sneak peek of something we would be talking about after lunch.  We studied this photo and talked about what we noticed.  This was a photo from the World Fair in Paris.  Ask me to tell you what I noticed.  This is not the exact photo I showed this morning, it's actually a better one but it shows the things the students noticed this morning.

We have been working with some phonemic awareness skills since the beginning of the school year.  The children are doing well with putting together words that have been broken into parts, not individual sounds.  They are working on listening to determine if words begin with the same sound.  We are approaching the end of our first twenty days where we establish routines.  We have had a few days where we have had testing instead of our twenty day lessons, but are working toward starting our first unit next week.  I will be doing a screening on students to determine a general reading level and we will begin guided reading.  
In math, I have been doing an interim assessment that is one on one with students.  It's taking some time, but the children are showing what they have learning with sorting, conservation of number, counting out objects to five, and subitizing to five.  We will work more with some of these concepts but they have a really good start so far.  It's important our students have a strong sense of number.  Subitizing is one of those skills that we work on to provide a strong foundation for number operations.
Subitizing is when students look at a group of items and know how many there are without counting.  Research tells us that students can subitize to three or four, but after that they are looking for groups or patterns in collection and arriving at how many based on what they know.  This is something I am seeing in their interim assessment; they are asked how many are in line of items.  Many of the students are telling me they know how many there are by saying things such as: "I see two and two," or "three and one."  This is just what we want to see!  
We opened our math stations today.  We talked about the difference between math stations and play.  I emphasized that this is our work in kindergarten, and that we would be using six inch voices.  I kept the activities simple to begin with so the kids could work independently while I did more testing.
We began a unit of study in Social Studies about symbols of the United States.  Ask me to tell you about the four symbols I learned about today.  
I have more testing to do this week in reading and math.  I will be out tomorrow afternoon at training for our Benchmark Reading along with all the kindergarten teachers.  Any last minute changes to your child's schedule should be called in to the office as I will not be able to check my e-mail.
Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe