PS/IS 686 | Brooklyn, NY

K-001 Week of 2/6/17

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Reminders: Puppetworks Field Trip – February 9, 2017 – Has been POSTPONED!

Kindergarten News:

In math, we have been exploring several problems involving apples boxes. It began with a story of a grocer who was trying to make boxes of 5 apples, but he wanted some apples to be red and some to be green. Students worked on making apple box plans for the grocer, showing how many apples could be green and how many could be red, while keeping the total number of apples 5. On a different day students explored the same question but with a box of 10 apples.

We discussed how to organize our work to figure out if we found all the different ways the apples could be in the boxes. Some students are beginning to use the commutative property of addition to find more possible apple boxes.  For example, if I have 4 red apples and 6 green apples, I can also have 6 red apples and 4 green apples. Mathematically this can be written 4+6 = 6+4. Here is some student work:

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Last week we began learning about persuasive writing.  We learned that words and writing can make a change in the world.  We began this unit by thinking about things we notice at school that might be a problem.  We brainstormed ways we could solve these problems and found that we can use pictures and words to help.  We created persuasive signs to let people know what they should or shouldn’t do in different situations.  Ask your child if a sign might help with something at home.  We also learned how to write persuasive letters to let someone know how to solve a problem or to ask for something you want. Here are some examples from the classroom:

Our Bread Study is off to a great start.  We will be reading several books, doing some baking in the classroom and taking some trips to learn more about the process of making bread. This week we watched a video to learn how bread is made in a bakery.  In one part of the video, we learned how to make baguettes. We also brought baguettes into the classroom and had a chance to observed what this type of bread looks like, feels like, smells like and tastes like. We also read Nanette’s Baguette by Mo Willems. Students are very excited about this investigation.