Reminder: Homework includes bringing a Letter Bag every week!
Letter of the Week: Zz! Please bring in an item that begins with the z/.
Help them to write all 3 clues on their own! Use sight words and phonetic spelling! Practice reciting the clues so we can share with them with the class. Thanks for your support!
I look forward to each day as my Kindergarteners grow, create, and imagine. Our classroom is a place where we learn together and from each other. This blog will follow us and our learning adventures this year!
Fall is here! We read about Johnny Appleseed and had fun with apples this week. Check out some of the activities we did!
Measuring Johnny Appleseed
We measured apples and compared their sizes with our friends’ apples!
Our apple art and labeling craft
Trying some yummy applesauce!
We are learning a sight word a week. Sight words, also known as high frequency words, are commonly used word that the students will learn to recognize and read by sight. We teach the word to be read as a whole vs. using decoding strategies.
We play games to make learning sight words fun! Check out the Sight Words link at the top of this page to see what words we’ve already learned and what words we will be learning. Here is a great website with more fun ways to practice our words!
We used the SMART tables in our classroom this week! The SMART table is like a big iPad as a table. The students work as a team to play games, answer questions, and explore! As we worked together, we learned more about colors and shapes. Thank you to the volunteers who helped us with this!
Making shapes at the SMART table
To remember the shapes and their attributes, we made shape puppets! Each puppet has its own name: Cindy Circle, Sandy Square, Ricky Rectangle, and Tommy Triangle. These puppets will help us to describe and identify these shapes.
We also made a Shape Monster Glyphs! Everyone loved making their monsters unique!
Leah, Ravelle, and Matthew’s Monster Glyphs
A fun way to begin drawing people, is to use shapes! Using sponge painting, we made Shape Friends!
Alia’s shape friends
Great job on the mystery bags this week! What wonderful clues and items beginning with /s/! We learned how to write the lowercase and uppercase Ss, brainstormed words that begin with the /s/ sound, and began to phonetically spell some of the words. Check out some of the activities we do with the Letter of the Week!
We continued our unit on colors this week by reading a familiar favorite, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? We practiced reading more color words as well as retelling a story. Who knew our class had so many wonderful story tellers?!
Acting out Brown Bear
Everyone made a class page for a class book. This was a fun way to learn our friends’ names and practice writing our own names (with one uppercase letter followed by all lowercase letters).
Daily 4 is a time we work specifically on literacy. Some of the centers include, reading, writing, working with words, and listening to stories. Everyone really enjoyed trying it for the first time this week!
Reading our color books
“Word Work”-spelling color words
As a culmination of our color unit, we made rainbow mosaics!
Specialist classes started this week too! We met Miss Holmes, our computer teacher, Ms. Shapiro, the PE teacher, and Mr. LaGuardia the music teacher!
We started our unit on colors this week. We learned how to spell the color words: red, yellow, blue, and green! Check out one of the songs we used to remember how to read and spell them.
Using watercolors, tempera paints, tissue, and tear art we made an art project for each color. It was a good way to introduce the different types of media and to continue reading and spelling practice.
For each color, we made color book. We read our first sentences and we were so proud to make our first books! We practiced tracking-pointing to each word while reading and reading from left to right.
Reading color books
Reading with a partner
One of our favorite projects this week was Pete the Cat! We read the story, Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes and made our own Pete’s wearing our favorite colored shoe. Afterward, each student made his/her own page about Pete for our class book.
Another story we read was called, The Dot by Peter Reynolds. This sweet story is about a girl who said she can’t draw. With a little encouragement, she painted a simple dot which lead her to create more dot paintings. We made our own masterpieces using watercolors!
We continued to explore lines and curves discovering that we use them every day in letters. Letters make words and our names (which we have been practicing quite a lot!). We had fun with an activity called, “Write the Room”! We wore special glasses to find words all over our classroom!
