Mrs. Grogan's Kindergarten: Week 26 Highlights!

What a great week!

In Second Step, we continued our child protection unit. This week's focus was safe and unsafe touches. We discussed how to recognize a safe and unsafe touch, refuse the touch with a strong assertive voice, and report the touch to an adult.

During Nora Project this week, we completed our second outcome: recognize emotion in peers and develop empathy. We celebrated by becoming empathy officers, find empathetic acts by friends in our classroom and around our school. Please take a peek at the empathy tic-tac-toe board to review these concepts with your child at home.

During our Shared Reading, we focused on the poem, Splish Splash. We used this poem to explore letters, sounds, blends and digraphs, rhyming words and print concepts. We introduced one new snap word this week. Our new snap word is will. Please practice identifying, reading, and writing our snap words with your child at home.

We continued our Word-Part Power unit in our Phonics curriculum. During this unit we will be adding, deleting, and manipulating phonemes to make new words. This week we learned about the word families -et, -ed, and -en.

In Reader's Workshop, we continued our fourth unit, Becoming Avid Readers. This week we reviewed reading playdates and goal setting. We introduced playing games during our playdates. Please ask your child to share with you how to play snap word hunt. While playing school, we can read aloud or participate in shared reading. Our goals when reading aloud are to book talk with our partner. When participating in shared reading, we focus on partner power to make our reading stronger. Take a peek at our avid readers.

Our Read Aloud this week was City Dog, Country Frog by Mo Willems. Our comprehension focus was identifying character, setting, and important events. We also sequenced the story whole group and independently. Please ask your child to retell our stories to you.

During Daily Five word work stations this week, we practiced manipulated sounds to make words. We rolled letter dice, blended sounds together, and determined if the word was real or nonsense words. We practiced labeling pictures at the writing table. We practiced phonemic awareness skills using the Lexia app. Please ask your child what was their favorite daily five station this week.

This week during Writer's Workshop, we continued our how-to writing unit. Our focus this week was creating a collection of writing about the things we have learned during our kindergarten year. Please ask your child to share with you the title of one or more of their teaching books.

In Whole Group Math, we continued our fourth Eureka Math module. This unit is all about number pairs, addition and subtraction to ten. This week we practiced composing and decomposing numbers to 6, 7, and 8 using linking cubes, number bonds, pictures, and number sentences. Please ask your child to share with you what the addition and equals signs look like. We have also been practicing subitizing and writing numbers to 20.

We completed our round of Math Tubs which include: one to one correspondence, addition to ten, nonstandard measurement, subitizing, and Zearn. Take a peek at our kindergarten mathematicians.