Kindergarten with Mrs. Trammell: TWO Weeks in Review

This time I have pictures from the last three weeks! Let's dive right in. Here's what we've been up to in reading:

As you know, Reader Man visited our classroom one night and left us a note about our super reader powers. He left us pointers to help us with our pointer power, too.

Each day we work on reading by ourselves, which we call private reading, and then we work with a partner. We have a target each day that helps us work on becoming better readers. We are working on pointing to one word at a time, using the pictures to help us with unknown words, finding the words we already know, like our sight (or snap) words, and using the sounds that the letters show. We're also working on rereading to understand what we've read and to sound just like a teacher when we read.

One day we looked around the room for words we know:

These past few weeks in writing, we have been working hard at the mechanics of writing: using spaces between words, thinking of the sounds we hear when saying a word and writing those letters, and saying the sentence we want to write out loud so we can count how many words we want to write.

We have been busy in math. We practice counting orally each day. We're also working on counting a collection of objects--sometimes we can move the objects, and sometimes we can't so we have to know where we started so we know where to stop. It's been fun practicing that.

We've been learning that there are different ways of making ten.

Also, we've been working on thinking of all the different ways we know how to make a given number. How many ways can you think of to make the number five, for example? A ten frame? Tally marks? Pictures? Sets of cubes? What does five look like on a die?

Geoboards have been fun as well. They are helping us describe and compare shapes. Ask your child how triangles and rectangles are similar, for example.

We've been working on telling stories in math, too. For example, we're working on figuring out if two birds are in the tree and three more birds are in the sky, how many birds do we have all together? Lastly, we have been working on writing our numbers the right size and the right shape. Working on dry erase boards makes everything more engaging, right?

We've been working on identifying and ordering numbers, too:

But our most fun in math had to be going outside and practicing our positional words:

It was fun in the classroom, too:

We've been working on recognizing our feelings and the feelings in others with our feeling buddies.

This past month we've working on learning how to be a handy helper by following directions, taking care of things, cleaning up, and doing our job. In addition, we learned that we are special because of the way we look, the way we feel, the things we care about, and the things we can do.

We have been learning about our five senses. One of the things we did was explore a pumpkin using our five senses. What fun!

Ask your child what the pumpkin felt like, sounded like, smelled like, and looked like on both the inside and the outside. We used pumpkins again to work on sorting. How is one group the same and one group different?

This group was sorted by color: orange and not orange.

Then we had stems and no stems.
We sorted the pumpkins by stripes and no stripes (in the colors) and by size, too.
We sorted ourselves as well: girl and boy, glasses and no glasses, short sleeves and no short sleeves, blue eyes and not blue eyes, and brown hair and not brown hair. Of course we had to practice counting the number of people in each set.
We brought in leaves, too, to help us with sorting: