Friday, September 23, 2011

Reading, writing, and arithmetic

We had a great week in Kindergarten!  The rhyming fun continued as we learned more Nursery Rhymes and introduced word families.  Each Kindergarten friend was given a word family tree and added beginning sounds to create words (real and silly) that matched the word family (ex. -at family would include cat, sat, flat, etc.).  This was also a great time to begin introducing consonant digraphs and blends to the children who were ready!  A digraph is a single sound represented by two letters (sh, ch, th, etc.), and a blend is two consonant letters together but you hear both sounds (bl, fl, st, etc.).  These trees are on display in the classroom!

In math this week, I introduced the ten frame.  The ten frame helps develop number sense with an emphasis on the awareness of quantity and of equivalent names for numbers.  The Kindergartners had a lot of fun using blocks to represent numbers in different ways (ex. to show a 6, you could have two rows of 3, one row of 5 and a row of 1, or a row of 2 and a row of 4).  I also introduced skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s through a fun counting game and our calendar routine.  Find ways to count around the house by 2s, 5s, and 10s!  Right now, many of the children are memorizing the numbers in order - much like a young child memorizes the alphabet song.  As the year progresses, they will begin connecting the skip number "chant" with actual counting and use it to count groups of objects quickly.

Grocery lists, wish lists, birthday party lists - all a part of our Writer's Workshop!  The Kindergartners were introduced to making lists this week, and they practiced making lists of their friends, colors, and numbers.  The learned that a list is a cohesive group of things all falling under one category, and they also learned to organize their lists by numbering the items, making dashes, or using little dots called bullet points.  They loved making their lists and were extra motivated to make the lists long, long, long!  What great writing practice :)
Sight word matching game

Integrated into our reading and writing are Words of the Week (WOW) - words the Kindergarten kids should have memorized and be able to read without sounding out.  They are also encouraged to spell these words correctly.  We introduced three more words this week through poetry and repeated reading and writing exercises.  The Kindergarten Kids also created a sight word matching game and played in pairs.  On Friday, we played WOW Bingo with game boards that the kids created.  How fun to hear all of the kids writing, reading, and yelling (nicely yelling, of course!) the words during the game!

Next week we will begin to learn about fall and use the new season to introduce science lessons, fun crafts, and more literacy and math activities!




No comments:

Post a Comment