Whats YOUR favorite?

Do you prefer Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, or McIntosh apples? Ask your kindie what they did in this activity. Ask them what "dot dot, not a lot" means :)

Reading is a Hoooooot!

Thanks to everyone who came out to Reading is a Hoot Night. We had lots of fun and it was a great informative event. We learned that Emerging Readers can read in three ways…

1. Read TO someone:

-talk about the story

-point to the words

-make a guess at unknown words; use the pictures as beginning letter

2. Read WITH someone:

-Interpret the pictures

-Look for popcorn words

-Take turns reading paragraphs or pages

-Each person read a chapter's parts

3. Listen to someone or something READ!

-Read with an older sibling or parent

-Books on tape, CD or apps

-Tumblebooks

-www.wegivebooks.org

Special thanks to our literacy coach, Emily Darby for putting together such a wonderful event!

What's 1 more?

We are hard at work in math. The kindies explored with a 0-10 sheet by adding one more to each number row and representing the numeral with fun objects….stickers! We figured out that as the numbers get higher, so do our row of stickers! Explore at home with stickers and numbers with your kindie. They love it!

We are ALL writers! Yes you, and you, and you too!

The wait is finally over! We have officially kicked off our launch into Writer's Workshop!!! Today was a very exciting day during our writing block. I talked with the kindies about how all the wonderful books we have in our classroom library, the very same ones we read each day, were all written by people just like you and me. Ordinary boys and girls! We talked about how these people are "authors" that means they wrote the book and that's why their name is on the front book cover. Authors write "stuff"and they call them STORIES. Every author has a story they want to share with people. Some authors write to teach, some authors write to laugh, other authors write to rhyme, and some authors just write a big story they have in their head that they think others will enjoy. I pulled these books from our classroom library and showed the students how each author wrote their books for different purposes….

"This author wrote all about Walrus's."

"_______________ wrote all about apples and pumpkins."

"_______________ wrote all about kindergarten!"

"______________ wrote all about animals who hunt."

I gave the kids a little while to sit and explore these books. They had to think about what they noticed that was the same in all the different books.

"Miss Leone! Every book has pictures and words."

"These books have lots of colors."

"There are animals and people."

"This book has a lot of pictures and not a lot of words on this page."

Everyone was right on! I wanted them to explore and realize that books have pictures and words, they have lots of colors, there is detail on every page, and alllllll the books are for others to read and enjoy.

We talked about how these authors thought of an idea, drew the pictures, and wrote some words down to tell their story so that we can enjoy them. I explained to the kids that from now on, I will start calling them WRITERS and that they too can write stories just like the authors we explored.

Writers write about all different things! Writers can write about their pets, places they have been to, their family, and activities. We talked about examples for each and then I allowed them to turn and tell their story to someone next to them. This allowed our writers to see how easy it is to come up with a story for others to enjoy!

Writing is just telling a story on paper!

activities - "I play outside on the monkey bars at recess. I love the monkey bars cause they are fun and I play with my friends."

pets - "I have 2 cats and a dog. One is black and the other is yellow and orange. They are so silly and I love to sleep with my cat at night."

places - "I always go to Storyland with my family. We ride on the bamboo ride and play together."

family - "It's me, my mom, daddy, and my 3 brothers. Daddy is taller than mommy but me and my brothers are smaller. We are strong! We love each other so much cause we are a family."

These are just a few of the stories we told. Ask your child to tell you a story about your family. We will keep orally telling our stories this week. Please please please send in photos of your kindie so they can use them as a tool for their story writing ideas. Monday will begin our official launch into small moment writing!

What shape has 3 sides, 3 vertices, and 3 angles?

Ding ding ding!!!! A triangle! We learned all about triangles today during our math block.

We explored triangles and observed that they have 3 sides, 3 vertices (points) and 3 angles (where two sides meet). After we recorded this information, we went on a triangle hunt and colored all the triangles yellow and the other shapes pink.

Then, we listened to a cool rap song all about this shape and created a triangle using our hands.

Last, we MADE a triangle out of our bodies! All we needed were 3 friends with super straight arms and legs!

The rest of us walked around the "kindietriangle" and we discovered that no matter how we look at the shape, it's STILL a triangle!

An apple a day keeps the doctor away!

We all know that apples are healthy. We know apples are good for you to eat. What else do we know about apples? Take a peek….

Our first science unit is apples! We will be discussing the parts of an apple, investigating and describing apples and we will even learn the life cycle of an apple. The kids are so excited about this unit! To launch this apple theme, I asked everyone what they already KNOW about apples. We had lots of great thoughts! There was a common theme about apples……."They're so juicy!" "I wish I could eat one right now!" "I love the red ones!"

Sooooooo, on the second day of our theme, I thought it would be fun and interesting to become scientists by observing 3 different kinds of apples, performing an apple taste test, and graphing our results! It was so exciting for the kids to see how we can incorporate science, reading, AND math all into one block!

We began by talking about the word "describe" and what it means. We all had a lot of great ideas. We came up with this definition - "describe means telling another person what something looks like". I explained to the kids that scientists "describe" things by using something called their 5 senses (this will be another science unit later in the year). As scientists, our job was to describe 3 different apples - McIntosh, Granny Smith and Golden Delicious - using our sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing.

 

 

 

we HEAR crunching

we SEE green, yellow, red, white little dots

we TOUCH thick/flat/smooth skin, wet flesh, 

we TASTE sour, juicy, crispy

Based on the pictures, can you tell which of our senses we are using? Can you also tell from our expression which apples we liked/did not like? Look at all the descriptions we came up with for the different types of apples!!!

To wrap up and incorporate math into this activity, we then voted for our favorite apple..

Counted how many names there were... 

                                      

Wrote the number…

….and added the tally marks to match!

Ask your kindie which apple they liked the best. Ask them what the Granny Smith apple tasted like….

We are so excited about this unit already! Don't forget about our field trip to Applecrest on Oct. 9th!! See you there :)

Quick Looks

WOWZA! Our math brains sure are growing in KL. We are doing a fabulous job with our "quick looks" cards. We can now quickly recognize 5 dots vs. 3 dots and can match them with the numerical number! Take a peek…..

The kindies learned how to play the math game "top it" which was super fun. All you need is a partner and different dot cards. Each partner gets an even number of cards and you both say, "ONE, TWO, THREE, FLIP!" Both partners flip the cards at the same time and whoever has more dots gets to keep both cards. Ask your kindie what happens when there is a tie and both partners have the same dot card….We talked about how being a good partner means being respectful, listening to each other, taking turns, and sitting "elbow to elbow knee to knee because that's the way that partners should be!"