What a Writer!

So I had to share Chloe's story today. Some children are starting to write sentences that begin with harder words....they've moved on from only I like sentences. We are also starting to add more.....so you can help at home by giving your child ideas for their stories.

Remember....your children are story writers! They write about life! It's so exciting.

Now, since I am used to reading phonetically written kindergarten stories....I'll help you out with Chloe's story.

By Chloe
I like books. Books are fun! I like Pinkalicious! Books are fun! Miss Dunker likes books! Books are fun to read! Do you like books? You should try!

Sorry for not posting...

With conferences approaching....I haven't had as much free time to put these amazing pictures up! SORRY!

We love to play cops. We designate 10 kiddos to be cops. They have a snap word and as the 'drivers' drive by....they have to read a snap word. If they can't read it, the cops send them straight back to the parking lot!

Cason....the cop. :)

We have been measuring for awhile now. Here is our table with items that are longer than our space sticks. WHOA! They thought this was pretty neat. They couldn't believe I would let them mess up the room. Haha.

Our shorter table!

So today was a BIG day! We've been working with unifix cubes and whiteboards to think through simple story problems. Right now we're doing problems such as these.....(so you can do some at home!) We'll progress to trickier problems later. For the past few weeks we've been learning to explain our thinking and listen to each other. Sometimes we don't agree with something we've seen and we have to explain why. (I ask why a LOT)

 

Well, today we had unifix cubes available if we thought we needed this 'just right tool' to solve the problem. I also let them work with a partner. We only got about 4 minutes to solve the problem. I repeated the problem a lot so they could think about the math involved. When they solved it, they were really thinking about what the problem stated to prove their solutions. It was AWESOME!

 

Miss Dunker had 3 cookies. Then she ate 1. How many cookies does Miss Dunker have left? 
2 hermit crabs crawled on the beach. Then 5 more hermit crabs joined them. How many hermit crabs are on the beach altogether?

Back to measuring. We are finding things shorter and longer than our sticks.

WHOA! Now that's some great writing. Who sent me this lovely picture? I think this is the work of our friend Ryken.......will you leave us a comment and let us know????

Writing at home?! A teacher's dream!

Here's Cason playing the computer at home. He's visiting a great educational site: www.starfall.com

We use this in the lab a lot! Thanks Cason :)
I also have to mention that this little guy helps a lot of our friends log on every time we visit the lab. SO independent.

Batty Kids! :) Just Kidding!

We've been learning so much about bats! Non-fiction is so fun and the kids adore it. I don't know if you remember seeing their non-fiction hermit crab books....but I think they've come a long way since then. Look at all of those spaces! Later this quarter...I will start working in small groups with kiddos who aren't spacing yet. We wrote one fact on each page.

 

It was a snowy morning, so we put blazinglogs.com on and wrote by the fire! Try it at home :) Very fun....crackling noises and all.

banana - great phonetic spelling

Whoa! Great try at fruit! Look at that -oo- chunk :)

I just love this drawing of echolocation....look how this writer spelled use.

The End. :)

Chloe points to each word as she writes!

Snoooooooowwwwwwwwwwwww! Happy snowy Thursday everyone :) I have to admit, it's kind of a fun way to start the day!!!!

Wednesday, October 24th

We learned about echolocation today. Bats don't use their eyes to find food....they use their large ears!

There's a great video here....

 

We acted out echolocation. One child was a bat, another a bug and of course, someone had to be the sound wave! VERY FUN :)

Tuesday, October 23rd

Today we tried problem solving on whiteboards. I don't want to tell the kids what drawing strategy to use.....but when you do a problem about cookies and they all draw beautiful cookies....the work becomes about art instead of math...so today was AWESOME! You can see Ava below. She used tally marks to do her thinking and got the answer really quickly! Then Ike showed us how he used circles and did the same quick work :)

Sure enough....you can see that a TON of kiddos saw this strategy and tried it as well. I want them to always get ideas from each other and come up with it on their own.

 

Today we were learning about how readers visualize or make mental images as they read.
We've already been learning about schema and making connections to books we read.
I would give them ideas like "A time you got hurt." The kids sat with a partner and visualized and then shared their thinking with each other.

 

Next week I'll be modeling how readers do this as they read!

21st Century Kid....

Mahlaya has a new LoVe---PBSKIDS.org (check it out at home!)

It amazes me to see how many kids come to school knowing how to run a computer. I still teach them the parts of a computer (monitor, tower, mouse and keyboard). I think it's wonderful that they're so excited to have computer lab and to integrate iPads/smartboards into our learning. It's so engaging!

Welcome Back!

Today we learned a new math game called Compare. We'll be adding it to our math stations next week. The game is played just like War---a card game many of you know! We talked about how they would know which number was greater. They had awesome ideas....

*Read the number
*Count the shapes
*Double check your counting

Friday!!!!

Katie is our new ir/er/ur chunk expert! She knew it was the last part of my name!
Proud, isn't she?

Bryson is working on our math warm-up---organizing the dots to make 1-6 (like on a dot die)

We learned that it's called roosting when bats hang upside down. They're roosting ALL OVER OUR ROOM!!!! :)

Yay! We have another new chunk expert. Look at Jaxon, our new ing expert. He helped Haleigh write the word playing today and he knew the chunk to write! WOW!

Look at these spaces! WAY TO GO GABI!

Avery is working on writing stories.....with more details.

GREAT SPACES Chloe!!!!

Mahlaya has awesome spaces too!!!