Week of September 27

Autumn is here and I've stocked out classroom library with fiction and non fiction books about everything Autumn.

New in math : "Beat You to 5". This is a partner game that encourages numeral recognition, working with quantities 1-5, and seeing various combinations of 5.

Working on our monthly calendar : October 

Happy October!

In the book area of Work Board, children worked on a book called I Am Helping. Their first task was to go through the pages and highlight all the 'am' words they could fine. Am was a new word wall word this week. Then they practiced reading the words, finally colored in the pictures. Each child has a book bin where books like this will be kept until we send them home.

Monster Math: children roll on or two dice, count the amount of eyes onto a monster and write to corresponding numeral in the box.

In FUNdations we worked on i and u.

Thus month I gave a formal lesson on drawing self portraits. I love this book, which is full of self portraits drawn by 2nd graders.

Students were given mirrors to look closely for details on their faces.

Working hard.

We have been working a ton with 5 and 10 frames. This whole group activity involved matching a numeral to a 10 frame. I also introduced the big idea of "justifying our math thinking". This is a very important skill across the classroom and we have been practicing explaining our reasoning.

In this math session, I flashed 10 frames and children built the amount with unifex cubes on 10 frame counting mats. This encourages the math skill of subitizing.

After building the amount, I had them show me the amount using their math hands.

Alphabet practice in ABC.

Mrs. Brady joined us for a lesson in Growth Mindsets and the ideas that our brains grow everyday in school. This happens by learning new things, trying new activities, risk taking, and persevering even when something feels difficult. We learned that the more we practice something, the stinger our brain gets.

Our brains sure are important and in charge of lots of things, like helping us learn.

YOU SKILLS: Learning about the skill of listening and ignoring distractions.

Practicing building patterns. We learned that all patterns REPEAT.

Unifex cubes pattern and recording.

Kindergarten was BUSY this week! Well...we are always busy! Our brains are growing, we are really delving into the various curricula, and are certainly working hard at doing our best kindergarten work!