FORCE and MOTION

We are LOVING our unit on motion! We know that objects don't move on their own. Objects need a FORCE like a push or a pull to move. To understand this concept, we have been exploring with balls and ramps.

Through our exploration, we realized that some objects ROLL, SLIDE, or roll AND slide when they go down a ramp. Take a look at our findings….


 
 


We took our knowledge further and decided to see if the TEXTURE of the ramp would affect how fast a ping pong ball would travel. We made predictions as to which ramp would make the ball go the FARTHEST. A ramp that was super bumpy, a ramp that had small bubble bumps, or a plain ramp… Ask your kiddo what really happened!

Math Stations

The kindies are hard at work on using a fun math game called "extending number train" to solve addition problems in a concrete way. We know that if we have 7, we show the number using unifix cubes. If we roll the dice that says "+2" then we add two more cubes and see that now we have 8! Friends take turns writing the equation and adding cubes to the growing train until they get to 20.

We are also exploring with length. We now know that the correct way to measure two objects are lining them up "bottom to bottom". That's our rule! We measured ourselves from our feet to our heads using string. Once we were all measured out, we ordered friends in the class from shortest to tallest! Can you guess who was the tallest in our class? Ask your kindie who they think….

 
 
 
 

Then we used our string to find things in the classroom that were COMPARABLE to our height. "Miss Leone is as tall as 5 rectangles on our rug". "__________ is as tall as the length of the pink table." "________ is as tall as 3 1/2  floor tiles."

Working with Words

We have been super busy with working with words and figuring out how word families are formed. We KNOW how to spell our popcorn word, "at" and we realized that AT rhymes with CAT. We know that to spell CAT all we have to do is put a C in front of AT. If we can spell CAT we can spell SAT, RAT, HAT, FAT, PAT, MAT, CHAT, AND THAT! These pictures show "word families" below are the AT and AN families...

 During our independent time, kids rolled letter cubes and thought of words to correspond

Our new "Words Their Way" school wide phonics/spelling program is practiced daily for 15-20 minutes. On Monday, kiddos are introduced to their new words and they cut them out along with their pictures to match. On Tuesday, kids sort with a partner in their small group. Wednesday is dedicated to sorting and glueing the words and pictures. On Thursday, kiddos go a step further and think of other words that have the same word family and practice writing them. Fridays are our "test" days. They are asked to spell the words and also decipher between "real words" and "nonsense words".

100th Day Smarties!

We are 100 days smarter in kindergarten!! At home we worked hard to collect 100 objects. This helped us to reinforce counting from 1-100. Friends collected 100 legos, hershey kisses, straws, rubber bands, and more! We went for a "dot hunt" around our classroom. Ask your kiddo where the secret 100th dot was! Take a look at some of our fun…