Butterfly Hatching

Yesterday our butterfly hatched during snack time. 

Word Study

At this time of year one big focus is on letters and the sounds they make. Our goal is for students to recognize letters with automaticity and recall the sounds those letters make with the same automaticity. Word study is an area where we learn many of the skills necessary for reading and writing words. Knowing letters and sounds fluently makes this work much easier. This is why we practice, practice, practice!! Our handwriting program also supports this learning.

In word study we are also focusing on skills such as rhyming, counting the number of words in a sentence and syllables. Or focus skills will evolve as the year goes on.

Here we are today placing stickers on the letters of our names. We are noticing the shapes, or parts of the letters, and the sequence of the letters in our names. With this activity we are building upon our letter knowledge. As a bonus, we are continuing to develop our fine motor skills by peeling and sticking those star stickers on our names!  

Writer's Workshop

We have begun our regular practice of Writer's Workshop. We are learning that we have stories to tell and we can write about them at writer's workshop. In kindergarten we do a lot of storytelling and planning of our stories. We talk a lot about what happened first in our story, next and last. For most of us, writing at this point in the year is drawing our stories. We talk about the many details we can add to our stories and eventually we will be adding labels in the pictures and writing letters and words for our sentences. Writing in the kindergarten year evolves from mostly drawings to eventually drawings with sentences. There is a large progression throughout the year and it's exciting to watch. I'll explain more about this as the year progresses. 

Below you can see us hard at work on our stories. It was so quiet and the kids were working so hard. They are taking this important work very seriously! 

 

Choice time fun!

Science

Today we learned about what it means to be curious. We asked, "How do scientists know so much?" and had the opportunity to do what scientists do. We went outside and studied something ordinary very closely and practiced asking questions about it. We noticed many new things and asked many new questions. This year, from time to time, we will be scientists. We'll study something and ask lots of questions about it. We'll try experiments, see what we can learn, and ask more questions. Today our message was that we can learn more and more by....you guessed it....asking lots of questions!

Handwriting

As I mentioned last week we use "Handwriting Without Tears" for our handwriting curriculum. This is a wonderful program and a welcomed addition to our kindergarten curriculum. With this program we use many tools to learn to write the letters of the alphabet. Right now we are working on upper case letters using multiple tools and learning modalities.  The letter we focused on today was E.

First, we all build letters using big lines and little lines, big curves and little curves. These are smooth wooden pieces. We do this on a blue mat that has a smiley face in the upper left corner. This is how we know where to start our uppercase letters. 

Next, we do "wet, dry, try" at the rug with chalkboards:  

*  Each child has a small chalkboard with the letter already written on it by me.

*  Each child has a small yellow or blue square of sponge which is wet, a small blue square of felt that is the dry, and a piece of chalk.

*  All together use the WET sponge to erase the chalk letter saying the verbal path of that letter.

*  Then we use the DRY felt to dry the wet letter saying the verbal path of that letter.

*  Last use the piece of chalk to write the letter saying the verbal path of that letter.

WET, DRY, TRY and repeat!

The verbal path is the way in which the letter is written. 

Lastly, we'll go to our handwriting books and practice writing the letter with a pencil. This step will happen for us next week! Baby steps first!!! 

Wordless Wednesday