Five for Friday

The votes are in! Here are our five favorite things from this week.
1. The Kid Heart Challenge: In P.E., Mr. Murphy set up a fun heart challenge to help us with our physical fitness. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures, so ask your child all about it.

2. Attribute Game: One of the games we played in math this week is the Attribute Game. There were two groups. One group had something the same and the other group didn't have that attribute. For example, one group was people wearing stripes and the group that didn't have the stripes had to guess what was same about the group. In this case--stripes! No one knew the attribute except Mrs. Trammell. We had groups of people with words on their shirts, students wearing boots, people who had things in their hair, and people whose names begin with H just to name a few. Sadly, again, I don't have any pictures. Other things we worked on in math this week are finding combinations that make ten, practicing that teen numbers are made of a ten and some more, and story problems. We also worked on explaining our answer. For example, we had problems where we all knew the answer, but we worked on explaining it.

3. Word Work: The students enjoyed working with words this week. We learned some new letter combinations and their sounds recently: -ang, -ing, -ong, -ung, and -ank. We read words with these new sounds and we write words and sentences, too! It was especially fun to find the new words in our poems. Guess what? I have no pictures of that either. I guess I was too busy having fun along with them.

4. Writing Workshop: We started a new unit this week, and we're learning how to write How-To books. We've learned that we need to pick a topic, touch each page while we talk about what we want to write, then start sketching. Ask your child what sketching is. Then we wrote the words. We came up with a good list of ideas for topics. We'll be working on How-To books for a few weeks.

5. Reading: For most of the students, reading is a preferred time of the day, especially partner reading. We've been using our super powers at extra strength to read more challenging books, and then we share what we worked on with our partner. Another fun part of reading: getting to choose books, especially our free choice book. Two of our favorite read aloud books this week were Tacky the Penguin and Sleep, Big Bear, Sleep. Ask your child which book was his or her favorite!

A Day in our Kindergarten Life

It's time for another day of school. What will it be like?
Our day starts off just like it always does. While we wait for everyone to arrive, we put our things away, order our lunch, and sit at our office to work on handwriting. We all have jobs, and some of us do them first thing in the morning.

After announcements, Mrs. Trammell sings her signal song and we join together at the carpet. Today is a little different because we meet with our Tiger Teams. We wait by the door for our fifth grade buddy to pick us up, and off we go to our Tiger Team.

We worked on writing goals for ourselves during our Tiger Team time. We had great ideas for goals!

Back in our classroom, we gather at the carpet again and do our brain smart start. We breathe, we unite, we connect, and we commit to our classroom promises and goals. Today we reviewed what to do when we're upset. We've been working on that all week. Everyone can get angry, and we're learning how to handle being upset in a productive, helpful way.

Next up is reading workshop. Mrs. Trammell teaches us something new or we review something we have been working on and then we practice reading on our own. This week we've been learning how to have our super powers at extra strength. For example, we can read harder books by really studying the pictures and thinking about all that is happening. We can have extra strength word power when we use the word look to figure out the word looked or looking.

We work with letters and sounds daily, too. We sometimes call this word work, and sometimes we call it OG. For us, it means the same thing. We review letter sounds, read words, and write words or sentences. Today we wrote a sentence. Ask us what a sentence needs.

We wrap up our morning with writing. Today we continued working on sentences by writing what Peter from The Snowy Day might say. During the week, we worked together on what Peter might be thinking or saying, and we wrote the words on large sticky notes. Then today we each got to do our own in a special speech bubble. We practiced cutting, too!

We line up to wash our hands, and then go to lunch.

After lunch we had indoor recess. Normally we have recess outside but since it was raining, we had a lot of fun inside. Ask us what a favorite indoor recess activity is. (Taking pictures of what's happening is a lot easier at indoor recess--ha!).

Then we have a read aloud. Not only have we been working on The Snowy Day, but we've also been learning about nonfiction writing with the book Penguins by National Geographic. We've been learning about headings, pictures, and captions. Sometimes there is a lot of information to take in with nonfiction books, and it helps to know about the features.

We practice our sight words with some special exercises, and then we read some poems. Sometimes we look for those sight words in the poems, and other times we look for rhyming words, specific sounds, or other things. This week we've learned about the -ing sound, and there are so many words that have -ing in them!

Specials is next, and today we had P.E. Ask us about our favorite special.

Math is next. We warm up with singing some songs, counting, and number sense activities.

Today we worked with shapes. We finished our shape snowmen, we looked for shapes all around, and we drew shapes we saw.

After math we did a little social studies. We're learning about neighborhoods.

Whew! What a busy day in the life of a kindergartner! Good thing the weekend is up next.