Mrs. Grogan's Kindergarten: Week 17 Highlights!

What an exciting week!

Our Nora Project focus this week was how we can tell how others are feeling. We can look at the face, body, and voice to tell our friends' feelings. This week, we played pictionary and gestures to guess each other's feelings. During this curriculum outcome, we will work to recognize emotion in peers and begin to develop empathy.

During our Shared Reading, we focused on the poem, Reindeer Games. We used this poem to explore letters, sounds, rhyming words and print concepts. We reviewed our snap words to, the, and, and you. Please practice identifying, reading, and writing our snap words with your child at home.

We began a new unit in our Phonics curriculum, Word Scientists. This week we used the alphabet chart with increased automaticity. On Friday, we celebrated the end of our first phonics bend with ABC School. Our kindergartners became teachers and taught their stuffies all about the alphabet chart, letters, sounds, and words. Take a peek at our word scientists celebrating ABC School.

In Reader's Workshop, we continued our third unit, Bigger Books, Bigger Reading Muscles. This week's focus was using our letter-sound knowledge to read the words, even unknown words, on the page. Take a peek at our kindergarten readers.

Our Read Aloud of the week was The Gingerbread Baby. Our comprehension focus was identifying characters, setting, and important events. Please ask your child to share the beginning, middle, and end of our story using their retell strip.

During Daily Five word work stations this week, used play-dough to make our names, created name puzzles, made name necklaces, matched letter and picture puzzles, composed letters using wood pieces and practiced phonemic awareness and phonics skills using Lexia. We practiced labeling pictures at the writing table. We began our second leveled sort in our Words Their Way curriculum this week. We practiced many of our new routines and procedures when cutting, sorting, and gluing pictures into correct categories. We also played partner sort and minute to win it. Please ask your child to share their sound sort with you. Please ask your child what was their favorite daily five station this week.

This week during Writer's Workshop, we continued to explore narrative writing our Writing For Readers unit. This week we introduced snap word and vowel charts in our writing folder. We can use our snap words charts to write readable stories. We are also checking that all our words have middle sounds. Take a peek at our kindergarten writers!

In Whole Group Math, we continued to explore measurement and data in the third Eureka Math module. This week we reviewed comparing numbers. Our focus vocabulary is more than, less than, and same. We have also been practicing subitizing and writing numbers to 10.

This week we completed small group gingerbread themed Math Tubs. Take a peek at our kindergarten mathematicians.