Week 24 Highlights

What a lovely week!  A huge thank you to all the parents who volunteered their time and materials for our Valentine's Day party. 

Here's a peek at our week:

On Monday, we had Ava's mom, Mrs. Walkup, as our Mystery Reader! She had us cracking up when reading the stories, The Clown Arounds Go on Vacation and If a Chicken Stayed for Supper. Thank you for joining us!

Our Shared Reading this week was Monster Love - to the tune of Oh My Darling, Clementine. We did word studies sorting by rhyming words, word families, and reviewed word wall words.

Our Read Aloud this week was The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.  We used our story to identify character, setting, and main events.  We also used picture cards to retell the story to classmates.  Please ask your child to share with you the details of our read aloud. 

We began new Daily 5 word work stations this week.  We reviewed short A and I by highlighting-a-word and sorting words by vowel sounds.  We also reviewed sight words by sorting and coloring.  We worked on writing, developed phonemic awareness skills using Lexia, and read to ourselves in our book boxes.  Please ask your child to share with you their favorite Daily Five station this week. 

In Reader's Workshop, we learned that as books become harder we need to use extra strength reading strategies.  This week's focus was building extra strength picture and snap word powers.  Mr. Degman joined us to teach a lesson about snap words with inflected endings.  Please ask your child to identify snap words and stranger words with you when reading together at home.

In Writer's Workshop, we learned that writers can write how-to books about things they learn throughout their school day.  We created a classroom chart about all the wonderful things we have learned in kindergarten, shared topics and planned our writing with our partners, and began our how-to teaching book collections.  Take a peek at our kindergarten writers hard at work.

We completed our round of Math Tubs.  During math tubs, we reviewed dice addition, number bonds, number words, and number sense to 100.  In whole group Math, we continued our work with Number Bonds - we continue to practice decomposing numbers within 10. We used cubes, equations, and number bonds to represent decomposition of numbers.  We introduced the partner game, Roll It, Make It, Write It using dice, cubes, and number bonds.  Mr. Packer visited for Thinking Skills and taught us about probability using red and green bears.  We also explored our heart themed STEM Tubs.  Take a peek at our kindergartners building heart-shaped structures using conversation hearts, pattern blocks, popsicle sticks and playdough, and Legos.  Look at our kindergarten mathematicians hard at work.

We ended our week with a Birthday Celebration.  Thank you Mr. and Mrs. Simoes for reading a story to celebrate Owen's birthday. 

UPCOMING DATES:

NO SCHOOL - Monday, February 19th--President's Day
Tuesday, February 20th--Messy Math Night--6-7:30pm
Saturday, February 24th--Irving Fun Fair--11am-3pm

Happy Long Weekend!