Trader Mates

Plants in a Row! We learned where different fruits and veggies grow!

Wow, this week we had a blast learning about the importance of farms and we applied what we learned about plants last week to plants on a farm.  After reading a fabulous book called, How’d That Get in My Lunchbox?? the kids were AMAZED that every food in our lunches were from a farm! We had acting as farmers, delivery truck drivers, grocers, and mommies and daddies buying food from the store!

Of course we had to eat! The kiddos were given veggies and then they had to determine what part of the plant it was! Carrots were a hit, broccoli-not so much!

This carrot is a root that grows in the ground!

A sneak peek of what you’ll see at Open House! “Trader Mates” groceries!

Jaxon wrote that he likes to eat carrots and its a root!

Farm landscape art with oil pastels

We’ve been really working hard on sight words that begin with “wh” and “th”. There’s quite a few we’ve learned but they can be a little tricky! Here are some ways we practiced them this week. Please continue practicing them at home.

Reading and writing sight words on the playground

“I have _____, who has ______?” The kids had fun reading their
sight words with their finger flashlights as we played this game.
They had to read their cards and listen for their word to be called.

Our butterfly friends were ready to enter the big world today. Good-bye, friends!

Rockstar, thank you for letting us watch you grow!

So long!

Planting the seeds...

We learned about the parts of the plant and what plants need to grow! We planted our own beans that will hopefully become amazing beanstalks! (picture to come soon!)  Jack and the Beanstalk was the perfect book to go along with our unit.

We drew flowers...

and wrote the parts of the plant on the inside along with what each part does!
They also circled the plants’ needs!

Relling the Jack and the Beanstalk story!

Keep practicing those tricky sight words: where, was, want, what, that, this, they! Here are some ways we practiced this week.

Tic-Tac-Know! The students chose a sight word and made up a sentence using the word.
Then they got to place their word on the board trying to get three in a row!

Practicing keyboarding and sight words!

Beautiful butterflies...

In our final week of our insect unit, we studied butterflies! We’ve been observing our caterpillars in class every day and we’re so amazed at the incredible changes they’ve gone through! Check out some of the projects we worked so hard on this week!

We learned all about the butterfly life cycle!

Our butterflies are in the chrysalis stage right now.
Can’t wait for these beauties to emerge!

The students wrote a mini report on butterflies
with interesting butterfly facts!

Yes, they drew these by themselves! Incredible budding artists!

The final product! Wow!!

Doubles addition! The students rolled a die and placed that many beans on one of
the butterfly’s wings. They made the butterfly symmetrical by placing the
same number of beans on the other wing.  They counted and added them together!

Our little photographers went out to search for symmetry around MATES!
The photos and QR codes will be posted next week, you’ll be
able to scan the codes to hear more about the photos!

We were all excited to hunt for symmetry!

We read a narrative story, The Very Hungry Caterpillar!
The kids recreated the entire book-cutting and
pasting pictures just like the author, Eric Carle.

They retold the story in their own words.
I loved the vocabulary they used-starving, humungous, etc!

All of the students are becoming quite the readers!!
These reading windows are perfect to keep the kids on track while reading!

Of course this week was extremely exciting because they performed the Friendly Neighborhood Helpers Play! Thank you helping out with the costumes and making it so special for them!

Thank you!

Insects

Our insect unit has been a very interesting one for the Kindergarteners! We’ve learned what makes an insect an insect. They have three body parts, six legs, and two antennas. Ask your child to sing you our song to remember all of their parts!

We read informational books about insects, specifically ants and ladybugs. They learned many facts about them and asked some excellent questions too! Some of our new favorite books were narrative stories, Hey Little Ant and The Grouchy Ladybug. Here are some of the insect themed projects we worked on!

Rockin’ around the clock! Reading clocks to the hour!
In the Grouchy Ladybug story, the grouchy ladybug meets a new character every hour.
We had a blast learning how to tell time!

Does it have capital letters, punctuation and spaces??
They had so much fun being “editors” correcting these sentences from The Grouchy Ladybug story!

Should the boy squish the ant?
The kinders wrote their opinions whether the character in the story should squish the ant!
They gave great reasons for their argument-they were quite convincing!

We used our sight words and insects we “caught” to build sentences. 

We also practiced adding using number lines!
These number line ziplock bags were perfect!

In reading groups, we practice building and reading words and sentences, reading strategies, and fluency and comprehension. After reading our books a few times, we echo read to practice reading more fluently.

Add caption

Using our new sight word “said” we made a few comic strip pictures in our journals!