Arbor Day Celebration

Rowe School kindergartners celebrated Arbor Day on Friday by participating in three different activities/lessons planned for us by Yarmouth's own tree warden, Deb Hopkins.

• During our first station, students watched a picture slideshow to learn how trees in Yarmouth have changed over years.  
• At our second station, children learned about invasive tree pests.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• At our third station, children participated in planting an elm tree.  Each child had a turn to throw soil over the tree roots.  They loved this! 

 In writing last week, we revisited small moment stories.  We reviewed the following:

• A small moment story is about one thing, in one place, at one time.
• Writers tell their small moment stories across many pages in a booklet.
• When writing a small moment story writers remember to tell who, what, where, and when.  We practiced doing this by taking a basic sentence, like "I played," and adding details until the sentence read "I played on the playground with my mom after lunch."
• Writers don't just tell the outside story (what others can see), they include the inside story, too (our thoughts and feelings in the moment).

 In reading this week we:

• Learned about compound words.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Reviewed what read-to-self should look like and sound like.
• Learned that readers can become more fluent by "scooping up" more than one word at once.
• Practiced reading CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words and CVCe (consonant-vowel-consonant-e) words.  Have you heard your child talk about "bossy e" or "super e?"  I bet you have!

Last week in math we:

•  Learned to recognize a pattern and assign letters to the pattern (ABAB or ABBABB).  Children then used interlocking cubes to create the same type of pattern.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  •  Used pipe cleaners to create bracelets with ten beads.  Children then grouped the beads in different ways in order to find combinations of ten.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

    

    Look at all the combinations of 10 the children came up with!

    
    

    
    

    
    

    • Learned that 10 bundles of 10 sticks equals 100 sticks.  Children played a game in which they rolled a die, collected that many single sticks, exchanged 10 single sticks for a bundle of ten, and exchanged 10 bundles of 10 for a bundle of 100.
      
   

This week, we will kick-off our ocean unit with a special visit from the Sea Bus on Wednesday and Thursday!  I am very excited for this visit, and I bet your children will have a lot to share with you Wednesday and Thursday.  Be sure to ask them what they saw and learned.

Until next week,
~ Katie