Kindergarten with Mrs. Trammell: Week in Review

It's been a great first week of school! I think that can sometimes be easy for a teacher to say, but I truly mean it. I do have one disappointment, however--I didn't get a chance to take many pictures!

One of the things we've worked on this week is learning how to behave in school. We read several stories to help us figure out some class rules. One of the stories was about a monster coming to school. That brought us to talking about what things we can do at school, and what things we shouldn't do at school. We've been calling it "above the line" and "below the line." That discussion evolved into our management system. I'll be talking more about the management system in this class at Meet the Teacher. We read No, David! written by David Shannon, and we learned that it's never too late to start making good choices. We enjoyed reading Don't Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus by Mo Willems, too. What did we learn from Pigeon? "No" means "no" no matter what. Ask your child to tell you what Pigeon did to try and get his way.

Although the students seemed to enjoy reading about David and Pigeon, the favorite book of the week was Press Here written by Herve Tullet. We had such a good team-building experience interacting with the book, and I want the students to know how enjoyable a book can be.

We talked about three letters this week: A, T, and B. See if your child can tell you the sounds of those three letters. We learned how to read three words, too! Red, yellow, and blue are three words we can read, thanks to some songs that are teaching us the color words. We've been working on learning the days of the week and the months of the year, and specifically what day is which and what month it is. We've been counting as well.

Lastly, we have learned about squares and rectangles this week,. Boy, am I impressed with what they students already knew and what new observations they made. Below is a picture of a Thinking Map we made as a class to show how a square and a rectangle are the same and different. Thinking Maps are organizers to visually show thinking. We'll be using Thinking Maps all year. I'll share more about what we're doing with shapes next week!