Introducing First Grade Buddies!

Mrs. Boutin's first grade class and our kindergarten class have partnered up as reading and writing buddies.  We will get together once or twice a month to read together and share our writing!  The children are very excited about this opportunity.  We met with our first grade buddies on Friday to share our best piece of writing from October.  This gives the children a new audience to share their writing with.

This week is Reading we:

• Learned how to make a plan for our reading each day.  The children practiced putting their books in the order in which they planned to read them.  By making a plan at the beginning of read-to-self or buddy reading time, the children waste less time deciding which book to read next throughout each block of time.
• Continued to practice retelling emergent story books.
• Practiced naming letters of the alphabet and their sounds (We do this daily.).
• Practiced finding specific letters and words in a piece of writing, like a poem or morning message (We do this daily, too!).
• Added the word "at" to our word wall.

 This week in Writing we:

• Learned that writers take a small moment from their lives and write a lot of details about that small moment.  We talked about the difference between writing one sentence about everything we did in a day (I woke up.  I ate breakfast.  I went to school.  I went to recess.) and writing a lot of details about one small moment.
• Learned to tell a story verbally across multiple pages before writing or drawing.  This helps us plan our story.
• Learned to say each word in the sentence we want to write and point to where we will write each word.  This is another way to plan our writing before diving right in.
• Fancied up our best piece of writing and shared it with our first grade buddies!

This week in Math we:

• Practiced, practiced, practiced naming and showing those tricky teens!   
• Learned about estimating.
• Practiced the tricky teens even more! 

 

Playing a number game

A number book to develop our knowledge of teen numbers

 

17 means "ten plus seven more"

Building an understanding of tens and ones

Drawing shapes to match a numeral

 

Ordering numbers

Number Match

Building a structure with a teen number of blocks

Creating a "shape monster"

Creating a "shape monster"