January 29, 2016
Dear Families,
This week we
read and compared several snowy day stories.
In The Snowy Day and Snow Day!, characters prepared to go
outside, adventured through the snow, and returned home to warm up. Children used these books to make
text-to-self connections and as launching points for writing their own
mini-books called “My Snowy Day.” We
made text-to-text connections between those two stories and A Silly Snowy Day, in which a turtle
snuck out of his home instead of hibernating with her mom and dad. Children are becoming more confident in
comparing characters, setting, problem, solution, and beginning, middle, ending
events among stories. Comparing texts
helps readers make more accurate predictions, better understand character
motivations and feelings, and, perhaps most importantly, enjoy the stories more
deeply.
Mrs.
Robertson, who works with out Guidance Counselor, visited our room to lead a
Second Step lesson this week. The lesson
helped the kindergartners think through how and when they could offer help to a
friend. Later in the week, we read The Biggest Snowman Ever, in which two
mice use teamwork to win a snowman building competition. The children then used teamwork in pairs to
make their own puffy paint, which they used to individually paint their own
snowmen. The children did a terrific job
negotiating who would be the glue partner and who would be the shaving cream
partner to make the paint. If you would
like to make the paint at home, simply mix equal parts liquid glue and shaving
cream.
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In math, the
children expanded on their work from last week to use small components to build
a larger whole. Last week, they explored
this concept with pattern blocks and shapes.
This week, they use d unifix cubes to build towers of a given number out
of two colors. This was challenging for
the kids at first because they are far more familiar with using the unifix
cubes to build patterns. We worked on
“keeping the two color teams together” (instead of making patterns), using the
same two colors the whole time, and making sure our towers were all the same
height. The purpose of building the
number towers in this way is to deepen the children’s number sense by exploring
ways that the number can be broken apart and built. We worked on identifying all of the possible
combinations to make the given numbers; kids were able to keep track by
“building a staircase.” We also
practiced naming and writing the equations that matched the various
towers.
Enjoy your
weekend,
Meg Keene and
Andrea McCarthy
Books We Read:
·
The Snowy
Day, by Ezra Jack Keats
·
Snow Day!,
by Barbara M. Joosse
·
A Silly
Snowy Day, by Michael Coleman
·
The
Biggest Snowman Ever, by Steven Kroll
Handwriting Without Tears
·
New Letters: G, Q, S
Sight Words:
·
New Words: in, is, it
·
Review: go, so, no, we, he, see, the, am, an,
can, and, like, my, a, I
Math Lessons
·
4-8 Building Numbers
·
4-9 Comparing Weight
·
4-10 Comparing Capacity
·
4-11 Counting by 10s
