Story Writing...

We have been working on our stories this week!  The children are becoming amazing writers...

May Flowers!

This week we will be learning a lot in kindergarten.  We will be completing Unit 5 in Reading Street.  We will be reading "This is the Way We Go to School."  We will be working on the comprehension skill drawing conclusions.  We will culminate the unit by going back to the big question "How do people get from here to there?"  We will pull all of our knowledge from Unit 5 and transportation to answer this particular question.  I hope the children have been coming home telling you about their learning in Reading Street and I hope you have seen improvement in their comprehension ability.  We have also been working hard on story writing.  The children have been writing stories all week and are making final copies.  It has been a lot of fun to read the children's writing and listen to the stories they have written.  The children have come a long way in the writing development.  We will be using these stories to help us with their writing assessment.  We will be assessing letter formation, spacing, punctuation, capital letters, and spelling.  When we assess for spelling we are looking to see if the children write what they hear; therefore, if a child was trying to write the word "monkey" we would expect the child to possibly write "muke."

We are currently still working on our sight words: where and come.  Please continue to work on these words.  In addition, we will be sending home a list of all sight words which should be mastered by the end of Kindergarten.  The words on the list are words we have been working on all year.  Your child should know these words in less than 3 seconds and should not try to sound them out.  Also, we are working on letter naming fluency (speed), letter sounds, and segmentation.  We will be sending home a new practice sheet this week.  We have our DIBELS assessment beginning next week; therefore, we want the children to do the best they can!

In math, we are continuing our work with addition and subtraction.  We are working with stories which delve into both addition and subtraction.  The children have to be able to determine if the story is an addition or subtraction.  We are also working on having the children identify the addition symbol and subtraction symbol as they are working.  This helps the children look to see what they are suppose to do before thinking they must add on everything or subtract on everything.

Finally, we are beginning one of my favorite units in science.  We will be working with plants.  The children will begin to learn about how plants live, grow, and the parts of a plant.  This will be what our centers revolve around over the next 2 weeks.  All the children will plant a seed and watch the first stages of a plant.  We will label a plant at our art center.  We will work with various seeds to help us with our addition and subtraction at the math center.  At our writing center the children will be writing about plants.  This helps children begin to develop a non-fiction writing piece.

I hope your children have as much fun this week as I plan on having!  Enjoy the week...

Story Writing Fun...

We have been working on stories...here is a sneak peek of our videos on our youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/mrstahlkindergarten)...

Voice Thread...

We have been having lots of fun this week with our story writing and ways to share our stories with everyone. We have used the Flip Video to post some of them on our You Tube Channel, but the other day I was able to learn a new web 2.0 tool of Voice Thread. I have played with it this week with some of the children and their stories. Here is Ethan's story about a "Boy Race." Our fantastic stories will be hanging up throughout the room and in the hallway for everyone to enjoy as they walk by. I cannot tell you how proud I am of these children for working so hard on these stories. We figured out today we have worked on them for 3 days (which in Kindergarten that is a long time)! We are also working on a culminating project of our science unit on the seasons of the year. Check back next week to see how it all turns out! While you wait enjoy Ethan's story...

Story Writing...Oh My...

I have to say what an amazing week it has been in writing! This week we began discussing simple stories with a beginning, middle, and end. The children had to draw a 3 picture story and then add words and/or sentences to describe the pictures. I was amazed how hard the children worked and the stories they were able to write. This week the focus was on choosing one topic and drawing the 3 pictures to tell the story on the topic. Next week, we will delve further into story writing by choosing one topic and taking the one topic to sequence even further by making it cohesive. Since this was the beginning of story writing I decided when I was talking with the children, I concentrated on making sure they were only writing on one single topic and having them think about first, second, and last. I hope your child has mentioned this to you at home because it was a wonderful sight to see in the classroom. If you have not checked out our You Tube Channel (www.youtube.com/mrstahlkindergarten) please do as you will see a few stories uploaded. In addition, here are some pictures of the children working hard...