Five Senses

The kids chose one of the five senses to share something they had learned. Enjoy!

ABC party

After finishing studying all the lowercase letters in Fundations, we celebrated by having an ABC party. We read lots of ABC books and had a special snack- thank you to parents who donated alphabet cheez-its and cookies!!

Rekenreks

Kathy Schaw (math interventionist) has been working closely this year with our kindergarten team around math assessments and instruction. She has introduced many new teaching tools to us as teachers, and the latest are Rekenreks! Kathy wrote a grant and got materials for us to each have a large class "Rekenrek" and materials to create a class set of mini rekenreks to use for instruction. She came in yesterday and demonstrated how to use them with the kids.

The main idea of rekenreks is that there are two rods- each with ten beads on them. Each rod has five red and five white beads. The kids use them to "build" different numbers by sliding beads over to one side. This helps children learn to decompose and see different groups of numbers. For example the number 6 can be seen as 5 and 1 more, or 3 and 3. Being able to break apart numbers in this way is an important foundation to the skills they will need in first and second grade!

Words Their Way

This week we also started using a program called Words Their Way. It is a spelling program focused on sorting words and pictures. The kids come in and cut up their sorts on Monday morning, and then during Work Board throughout the week they sort the words based and glue them in a notebook. The program starts out with beginning letter sounds and they sort pictures. Then it moves into same vowel word families, then digraphs and blends, and beyond! After a short spelling "show me what you know" with the kids I was able to pick which sort would be appropriate for them to start on based on what they already know and what they need to learn! The kids are excited about it!

Five Senses in Kindergarten

We have been studying the five senses and this week we did some stations around smelling items and trying to guess what they were (clementine, coffee, and peanut butter were some examples!). We also used our sense of touch to feel an object from the classroom under a blanket and guess what it was. Lastly, we made a chart of our snacks and whether they were sweet, sour, salty or bitter. We noticed that most children had sweet or salty snacks!

Wishes for the World