K002 – Week of 1/16/17

In reading we are learning to be SUPER READERS!!  Students will learn different strategies or “super powers” for reading words in books.  We learned our first strategy last week: Pointer Power!  Kindergarteners learned to point under each word as they read familiar books and poems.  Students had most of the words memorized so they just had to focus on matching each word said to a word on the page. We are all excited to use our strategies to read lots of words.

This week we will continue learning more strategies. These include Snap Word Power (recognizing sight words we know in a snap in our books), Picture Power (using pictures to help figure out words), and Reread Power (go back and reread to make sure the story makes sense).  Please continue to make sure your child comes to school each day with their book baggie including all of their books and their super hero card (Light Orange Card with Super Reader Character picture on it) .

In writing, we have been working hard on writing true stories about our lives. In the classroom, we have learned that writers can…

• Include speech bubbles to show when people are speaking
• Use action marks to show movement in a story
• Add how they felt to their story
• Add details
• Reread story to make sure it makes sense

Here are some ways to help your child at home as a writer:

In math last week, we read a story called The Sleepover to help us explore part, part, whole relationships.  In the story a little girl and 7 of her friends change positions on a bunk bed, some sitting on the top bunk and some sitting on the bottom bunk.  It starts with 4 kids on the top and then 4 kids on the bottom.  Then one kid moves to the bottom bunk so now there are 3 kids on the top and 5 kids on the bottom.  This can be written as two equivalent expressions: 4+4=3+5  Kindergarteners had to think of more ways the eight kids could sit on the bunk bed.  This week we continued to explore this context but changed the number of kids on the bunk bed. Students had an opportunity to create their own bunk bed stories using numbers other than 8. They worked on finding all the different ways that number of kids could be on their bunk beds and showed different ways to represent those ways on their paper. Here is some of our work: