Ask Me About Thursday, January 5, 2017

Today we had a visit with our counselor, Mrs. Kanter.  We talked about DeBug.  This is a set of strategies students can use to solve kid size problems when other students are bugging them.  Ask me to tell you about the stdeps in DeBug.

Mrs. Kanter and the students used role-play to practice using the different strategies.  These strategies are just for kid-size problems.  Of course if a child is hurt on purpose by another child they should get adult help immediately.  Other times that would be appropriate would be if the other child is threatening to hurt them or is using inappropriate language.  It's important for children to be empowered to solve kid-size problems, but to know adults are there to help them practice and learn to use the strategies.  After all, a big part of kindergarten is learning to be part of a group.
In math today we practiced counting on 1, 2 or 3 to numbers 6 or less.  We played a game called Snowman Race where kids rolled two dice, one a standard die and the other with the numbers 1, 2 or 3 on it.  They would count-on using only 1, 2 or 3 fingers to  find the number of spaces to move.  If they landed on a snowman they got to move ten spaces.  We played on a 120 chart, so they know that adding ten moves them down one row.  If they landed on a snowstorm, they had to move five spaces back.  I'm not even exaggerating, some children were dancing around they loved this game so much.  (I promise it was not a snow dance.)  We will continue to work with counting-on over the next few weeks.
We talked more about animal life cycles.  We saw a short video about the life cycle of different groups of animals.  Then we met our mealworms.  We will be observing the life cycle of a mealworm.  Ask me to tell you what molt and metamorphosis means.

Have a nice evevning!
Miss Wolfe