Kindergarten Family Friday Oct 27, 2016
It was wonderful to see so many families at Family Friday last week. It was a joy to watch students show their parents around the classroom and share all the wonderful things we have been learning. They were very excited and proud of all we have done so far. I look forward to our next community gathering at BSI. Here is a little information about what we have been learning.
In word study, we have begun learning letters, sounds, and letter formation(handwriting) using a program called Fundations. Fundations is a systematic, sequential, multisensory approach to teaching writing early learners how to write letters. We begin by explicitly teaching how to write lowercase letters. So far, we have learned the letters t, b, f, n, m, c, a, i, r, and o. We have also started to learn sight words. Sight words are words that appear frequently in many texts that people read, but can’t easily be sounded out. Learning them helps children become more confident readers. Our words come from shared reading text. Words we have learned so far include I, the, see, is, my, to, and a.
We are continuing to use real artifacts to drive our writing unit, Writing Like A Scientist. We have been working on writing more information about the same types of objects and turning our work into multi page booklets. We continue to use our senses to draw detailed pictures, add labels and write about what we notice.
In math this week, we worked on the idea of comparing. We used cube towers to compare lengths of objects in the classroom and described them as longer or shorter. We also compared the number of letters in our names to the names of some classmates and described them as longer, shorter or the same length. We then began thinking about comparing numbers. We initially explored this by grabbing a handful of colored tiles and comparing it to a partner’s handful. We came up with different ways to record our findings. We also learned how to play “Compare” using number cards. This is a game you can play at home with your child using a regular deck of cards (without the picture cards). Each player takes the top card. The players compare by saying which card is more or less. The player that has the card with more gets to keep the two cards.
Brooklyn Conservatory of Music (BCM) –
Every week, kindergarten students are engaged in musical expression based on the Orff Approach to music and movement. Students are learning to work together, sing, make rhythms with their bodies and play a variety of instruments.