Monday, January 30, 2017

Hello Weckie Families!!

It has been a busy, but fun couple of weeks in Kindergarten😀. The addition of Miss Lempert in our classroom has been fantastic! The kids are really getting to know her, her teaching style and I'm most certain she is learning a lot from them too. It's exciting when we get the opportunity to have a Student Teacher as they bring a wealth of new ideas, new energy and passion to the classroom. Miss Lempert has been gradually taking over more and more of the teaching responsibilities in the classroom while I'm right alongside observing, coaching, and getting to work with students who may need extra help.

PBIS Recess We were so excited to finally fill up our PBIS Shamrock Board in the main hallway! As a treat, when a grade level fills up the board with hard earned shamrocks, they get an extra 20 minute recess! We were sure to pick a nice, mid-forties, sunny day to go out and play with the whole grade!


Reader's Workshop
We have just begun our third unit in Reader's Workshop and have been working on learning all about characters! Our Mentor Text, the tale of Chicken Little, has helped to teach us all about characters in stories. We have been using the chart shown below to guide our study of characters. Each child had time to put themselves into the role of a character and tell about themselves before we took apart Chicken Little as a character and learned to describe him and Foxy Loxy. We have spent time looking for characters in our own texts that demonstrate the use of dialogue. Additionally we did some role playing with the characters from Chicken Little and the kids got to act the parts! Be sure to ask your child to retell you all about this story. To wrap up the unit this week, we will be making our own Chicken Little. If you are able, please send in ONE (or more) empty toilet paper rolls. We will need about 25 total. Thank you!

Word Wall Words: The Word Wall list is growing:  be, can, four, five, go, have, is, it, I, one, see, six, the, to, two, three, you - are all words currently on the word wall!

 Writer's Workshop
In Writer's Workshop we have also begun a new unit all about pattern books. A pattern book is a book that has a repeating line throughout each page of the book. Many of the sight word books we use are pattern books. Also books like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See  and There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly  are also great examples of pattern books. Each author began working on their own book using the pattern: I see _______. We spent time talking about how to complete the sentence with good details, how to add a surprise ending on the fourth page, how to make the illustrations match the words and the dynamics of a sentence. It has been fun to watch our writers' blossom and create books on their own!

 

An Update from Miss Lempert:

Hello kindergarten families!

 

I’ve loved being able to get to know some of you and getting to work with your children every day! It’s been so fun getting to know your kindergartners. We’ve been learning a lot in kindergarten this past week.

 

In “Making Meaning” this week we read, “Charlie Needs a Cloak.” This book was about how a shepherd needs a new cloak and all the steps he goes through to make a new cloak. In the end, a sheep eats the cloak he worked so hard to make. Kindergarteners really enjoyed this book! We did a few retelling activities with this book, a sequencing activity where we put all the events in order, and then we did a writing piece. For the writing piece, we talked about how Charlie was very resilient. He never gave up on finishing his coat, even though his sheep gave him a hard time throughout the story! Kindergarteners were able to write about a time they were resilient and illustrated a picture to go along with it. I’m very proud of them for what they came up with! Their writing and drawings were awesome!

 

In math this week, we were doing a lot of work with combining! Tuesday and Wednesday were all about combining shapes to create hexagons. Kindergarteners explored shapes by playing with pattern blocks. They were all able to come up with ways to combine shapes (other than using hexagons) to create hexagons! For example, 6 triangles make a hexagon! They did really well with this activity. Thursday, we combined colored connecting cubes to build numbers in many ways. We found that there are many ways to show the number “5” using only 2 colors of cubes. Kindergarteners then had the opportunity to try this on their own. Every table had a different number (5, 6, 7, 8 or 9) to play around with. Everyone seemed to have fun with this! Recording sheets from both days were sent home in their folders. Take a look at their hard work!

 

I’m looking forward to being back with your children next week and have some more fun while we learn! I absolutely love kindergarten and can’t wait to see what exciting things will happen next week. Have a great weekend! :)

 

Important Dates:

Wednesday, February 1st: 1/2 Day of School - School dismisses between 12:00-12:09 depending on your mode of transportation!

 

Thursday, February 2nd:  Jump Rope for Hearth Health Kick-Off Assembly - info came home last week on a mini-magnet! Please check the Dublin Times for more information.

 

Friday, February 3rd: Pennies for Patients Coin Collection Day

 

 

Friday, January 13th

Hello Weckie Families!

Happy Friday and long weekend! We have been super busy in Kindergarten - and having so much fun!! It has been great to add Miss Lempert to our classroom and always nice to have a second teacher around too.  We have been working hard since we came back from Winter Break! If you happen to be in our hallway, come check out our New Years' Resolutions on the bulletin board. Lots of great ideas for us to try in 2017.

Thank you to everyone who sent in money for our first Pasta for Patients collection today. Remember you can do it online at this address: http://tinyurl.com/WeckiePennies  . We will be collecting again next Friday. Thank you so much for your support... it would be pretty cool to raise the most money of any class!


Reader's Workshop:
In Reader's Workshop we have been working on oral retellings of some of our favorite books! Being able to orally retell a story is a wonderful reading comprehension strategy for our young readers. Last week we spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the story of "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly". We learned the song and then created our own "Old Lady" as a visual to help us to retell the events of the story in order. We also read some variations on the original, such as "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow", "Who Swallowed A Bell", "Who Swallowed a Pie" and so on. We had great fun learning to retell this story that we did another story this past week. This week we used Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle's "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" to retell the events of the story. Miss Lempert did a lot of work with the kids reading and retelling the story. Then each child created their own visual for this story where their coloring of each animal had to match the story. Then we got to retell the story without the book using our Brown Bear visual! Look for these to come home. Be sure to have your child use both the old lady and the bear to retell these beloved stories to you and your family.

Meanwhile Reading Groups are firing up and off to a great start!! Each child has received a colored canvas type bag with their name on the front. Each day that they work with me in their group, they will bring the bag home with them. Typically they will have ONE new book and ONE familiar book (old book). This way they have one that should be a familiar read for fluency and confidence, and one new book for them to learn to decode and use reading strategies to learn to read it. These books are leveled and have been selected to meet the strengths and needs of your child. We have 6 groups that I will continue to rotate and see to the best of my ability! Every group should hopefully meet 2-3 times a week depending on their needs. Please make sure to spend ample time at home with the books that come home. Read them a few times, have your child point out different words, help them to break apart new words by sounds or use the illustration to help them. You can ask them to retell their story too - what happened first, then, next, last, etc! When returning the book(s) be sure to sign the Reading Form and keep this in their canvas book bag. So far we are doing an awesome job taking books home and returning them on time - way to go!

*Our new sight word this week was: be

Writer's Workshop
We continue to work on our Writing Wizard unit with the kids. It has been fun to watch their development in writing sounds, words and even sentences over the course of this unit! Soon we will be wrapping up this unit and moving onto a new unit!

One of our latest Writing Wizard's with his completed work.

We have also been toying with the idea of Writing Folders and what they will look like this year in Kindergarten. We will probably begin to send these folders home in the next few weeks. There are directions inside the folder about how to use these "journals" at home to encourage your child to keep writing. This will also give you a chance to see what your child can do and what you can help them work on at home to strengthen their skills. Each week we will ask that they do a minimal of two writing entries, complete with a colored illustration. The writing is to be done in pencil, illustrations in crayons or colored pencils are great. You'll be side-by-side with your child to help them to phonetically spell each word (how it sounds, regardless if a word is spelled correctly) unless it is a sight word, which they should be able to do on their own! More info to come soon :-).

Math Workshop

Collecting our favorite color data for our graph!

We have been super busy in Math lately! We have done several math station rotations to practice learning new math games including: Roll and Record, Monster Squeeze, Number Top It, Spin and Move and more! This past week it has been all: shapes, shapes and more shapes!! Your child should be familiar with these 2-D shapes and names: circle, square, triangle, rectangle, trapezoid and hexagon. Please review these shapes at home with your child - they are everywhere when you stop and look! We have spent time talking about attributes of shapes (their characteristics that make them the same and different). We have been using the Connect Ed Software to incorporate technology into our exploration of these shapes. We sorted the attribute blocks whole group and small group. We talked about how we all have different attributes too (kids with jeans on vs. kids with buttons on). Kids got to pick attribute blocks out of a Mystery Bag, solely based on the attributes they could feel! This was a super fun challenge! We ended our week with a graphing activity where we determined that blue is the most popular favorite color in our class and yellow is the least popular!

Sorting out the attribute blocks on the Interactive White Board.

We had fun incorporating the technology of Connect Ed!

Unit 4 HomeLinks will be coming home with your child today and are filled with awesome reinforcements of all we have been doing in school. Most of the activities are pretty quick and very well liked! 


Social Studies
In Social Studies this week we have been talking about Diversity and tying it in with learning about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the holiday on Monday. We have read a few great books about Dr. King and have also spent time with Todd Parr's book "It's Okay to be Different". Each child created their own page to go in a class made book about what they think about diversity - like it's okay to have blue eyes or it's okay to like the color pink. It's been pretty neat to hear what the kids think about diversity and why people should be treated equally and fairly all the time. I think many were pretty stunned to learn that people were once treated differently because of their skin color. While we keep the convo pretty light, each child was receptive and engaged. They were curious and also glad to hear that the laws had changed.

PBIS Teams
The first Thursday of each month we meet with our K-2 Multi-Age Teams. A few of our kids stay and are a part of Weckstein's Warriors, while the majority travel to a different K-2 teacher and school wide, K-5, we are doing the same lessons about positive behavior plan for Dublin. We focus on the shamrock characteristics: be responsible, be respectful, be resilient and have good integrity. This month January we are focusing on having good integrity. Your's truly was responsible for planning the building wide lesson and I put our kids to work! The vast majority (not all) have drawn a picture of when they have shown good integrity and we created a video and large bulletin board display in our hallway! Our kid's had some awesome ideas of ways that they have had good integrity. I'm proud to spend my time with such a great group of kids :-).

Important Upcoming Dates:
-January 16- NO SCHOOL in Observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

• January 20 Pennies for Patients Spare Change Collection #2 
• January 20 PTA Family Bingo Night (6:30-8:30 PM) Cafeteria - Please come, the Weckstein's are hoping to be there!! :-)

Welcome Miss Lempert!!

Hello 204 Families!
 Welcome back and Happy 2017! I hope you had a wonderful break and were able to enjoy the time off from school with your Weckie! We are eager to get back into the swing of things here in Kindergarten. I would like to take a moment to introduce a new face in our classroom. Mara Lempert will be joining us from Central Michigan University as a Student Teacher for about the next 10 weeks. You will be hearing more from her in the next few days but we are excited to have her here. She'll be getting to know the kids quickly as they are already very interested and happy to have her here. Soon she'll be shadowing me and eventually teaching the kids during the day as well. Welcome Miss Lempert!!