Taking in the Sunshine!

What a beautiful week we had!  The sunshine and warm temperatures were a nice change from last week.  We really had a chance to enjoy our new playground.

This week during Reading Workshop we spent several of our lessons learning more about characters.  We learned to:

• pay attention to a character's facial expressions and body language to determine what they tell us about how a character is feeling.
• pretend to talk like the characters and say things we imagine they might say throughout a story.
• think about what all the pages together tell us about a character.
• retell the big idea and details after reading nonfiction.
• read fluently by paying attention to punctuation.  

This week during Writing Workshop we kicked off our poetry unit.  The children took off with their poems and were so engaged and creative!

• On Monday, we listened to poems about rain that last year's kindergartners wrote.  We then wrote a class poem about rain, and then each child wrote his/her own poem about rain.  Even though we all wrote about the same topic, all the poems were so different!
• On Tuesday, we listened to, and discussed, more poems that other children wrote.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On Wednesday, we took a trip outside.  The children sat in their own space for about 15 minutes, recording all the things they could hear, smell, touch, and see.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On Friday, we used our observations from Wednesday to write nature poems.

This week during Math we:

• spent Monday and Tuesday learning more about measurement.  We measured width, height, area, weight, and capacity.
• played The Growing and Disappearing Train Game to help us practice addition and subtraction facts.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• created classroom maps to help us make connections between the real world and spatial models that represent it.  We then used our maps to help us find hidden objects in the classroom.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

During Science, we used different sized screens to sort a collection of river rocks.  Then, we learned about the names of the different sized rocks (sand, small gravel, large gravel, small pebbles, and large pebbles).

Have a nice weekend!
Katie