A Busy Week!

Hello families!

We continue to work on building community and establishing procedures and routines in our kindergarten classroom.  It is pretty amazing to see the progress we have made in just thirteen days.  These students are working hard and learning to do their best in kindergarten!

One of our many community writing projects this week involved explaining our Zones of Regulation chart.  Using colors and numbers, this chart helps us to remember where and when to use our appropriate voices at school.  We even came up with examples of things we might be doing for each category.  This has been very helpful to us!

In Writer's Workshop, we have been focusing on storytelling, which is the foundation for writing!  Everyone has a story (or more!) to tell.  We have learned how important it is for the storyteller to speak clearly, make eye contact with the audience, and add details to the story so the audience can visualize, or see it.  We have also discovered that it is important for the audience to look at the storyteller, listen and try to "see" the story, and to ask questions.  It has been a great experience and we will work more on this next week.

   

We completed a pretty cool community project this week.  We read the story "The Crayon Box That Talked" by Shane DeRolf.  In this story, the crayons did not get along very well.  After a little girl bought the crayons, she brought them home and taught them how to get along.  At the end of the story, the author writes:

"We are a box of crayons.  Each one of us unique.  But when we get together, the picture is complete!"

We talked about what we thought the author's message was to this story and we decided that the author is teaching us to be kind and good to each other.  Next we did a project that would show that we are each unique students, but we are also a community.

Mrs. Kurt gave each student a puzzle piece.  Students had to print their name on the puzzle piece.  Then they had to decorate the piece with pictures that showed things they like to do or things that are important to them.  When they finished decorating their puzzle piece, they had to cut it out.

   

We gathered on our rug and went to work, putting the pieces of our puzzle together.  Mrs. Radermacher helped us, too.

 

And here is the finished product:

In Math, we have been learning how to use our math work places properly.  We are learning how to get the work places out, how to use them, how to clean up and put them away when we are finished using them.  We have also been exploring some pretty cool math tools in these work places, including unifix cubes, polydrons, geoboards and geobands, pattern blocks and the bucket of bugs.  We are really learning how to work together with our friends when we explore the work places.

   

   

   

We had our first fire drill today.  We practiced before the real drill so when the drill took place, we were ready.  The fire alarm is pretty loud, but we did an awesome job.  It has been a fun week in Mrs. Kurt's kindergarten class!