Apples/Word Work

What a busy week!! We celebrated Johnny Appleseed and Fall this week by doing many apple activities! We all brought in apples this week which we investigated, graphed, and taste tested! I took everyone's apples (the one's that weren't dropped too many times! :) and put them together and made some homemade applesauce! This was quite an adventure for me this year because as I was pushing down on an apple with my apple slicer, it broke and I cut I my finger! Well 2 hours in the ER and 3 stitches later...Ugh...Well I did manage to get the rest of the apples cut up in the morning and the applesauce was a success. We also used some of the apples to do apple print patterning. We had a great week with apples!!

We also introduced our second daily this week, Word Work! During this daily, the students get to use materials, such as white boards, magnet letters, letter blocks, stamps and more to practice spelling their popcorn words. The students did a great job with this and are very excited about having 2 dailies now!!

Seasons

Last week was all about seasons! We talked in depth about what we already knew about each season, and then we read books and talked about the new information that we learned! On Friday we pulled together everything we learned and talked about an apple tree throughout the four seasons. We did an art project using crayons and paint to show what an apple tree looks like in each season. They turned out great!! This we we are on to Apples!!

Daily 5

This week we have really been working hard on building our stamina for Read to Self! We have gotten 9 minutes of stamina for 3 days in a row now!! Read to Self is the first of 5 dailies that will be introduced. During Read to Self, the students each have their own book box with books that they sit down and read independently. Once we have good stamina built (hopefully by next week!) I can start individually conferencing with students and listening to them read! This is one of my favorite things to do!

Here is our I-Chart for Read to Self. We have listed the reasons why we do it and all the behaviors that should be displayed during Read to Self.

This is a poster to remind us of the 3 ways we can read a book! We review this everyday!

 Here is our CAFE menu where we will be putting all of our strategies that we will learn to help us be better readers! We learned 2 new strategies this week. "Read Words from Left to Right." and "Listen with Understanding."

Hooray for You-ness!

Today we read the story "Hooray for You! A celebration of you-ness!" This is a great story to talk about how we are all special and unique. We talked about the ways we might be alike, but when all of the parts of us come together, we are special and no one else is the same! We then created paper dolls in likeness of ourselves to show how we are all unique! They turned out great!!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

This week we did many fun things using the book "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom." We read the story and watched the video multiple times. We got together with the other 2 Kindergarten classes and decorated letters for our "Chicka Trees" bulletin board in the hallway. They look so cute!

 We also did a coconut counting book and an alphabet coconut page using bingo dobbers. Today we finished up by making our own "Chicka Trees" using our arms and hands as the tree. We then got to dig through a bucket of letters and find the letters in our name to go on our trees. They turned out great!