Week 26. February 25 - March 1

Can you believe it’s the last week of February already? Time does move fast when we’re having fun!

Snack and recess

Creativity Celebration: Legos!

Reading Celebration with other grades!

Learning This Week!

Reading Workshop

This week Kindergarten readers begin an exciting new unit about story elements! Our students will begin to learn new ways to read, think, and talk about story books. Who are the characters? What do they do in the story? How can the pictures help us figure out what is happening in our books? How can we notice and explain the beginning, middle, and end of a story? Getting in the habit of thinking about story elements will help students with comprehension! Throughout the unit, kindergarten readers will also continue to review past reading Super Powers like “pointer power” and “persistence power.” 

Writing Workshop

Writers are moving along the writing process as they create their first “All about” books! This week we will continue to focus on planning our books and organizing the information we know. Writers may choose to use planning sheets to organize the facts about the topic they have chosen, to then add pages for each fact. By organizing the information from each topic, writers make sure they stay on topic!

Midweek, we will move into the revision part of the writing process, rereading and adding more to each page. One strategy writers use is asking themselves “what else can I say here?” or use their partners to bounce ideas back and forth. Partners can be very helpful by asking questions about their partner’s topic!

Math

This week mathematicians will work intensively with the number pairs of 9 as they demonstrate different combinations of sleeping bears and honey tree–hunting bears using counters and record with number bonds. Students  will have the opportunity to decompose 9  and 10 into number pairs using representations of fingers, linking cubes, and number bonds. They will explore patterns in the number pairs.

As always, the decompositions are discussed or recorded using number bonds, drawings, and number sentences.This topic’s decomposition situations, like those in Topic B, are put together with both addends unknown addition equations modeled by the equation C = ___ + ___ . 

Circles

This month kindergarten students will start discussing the core value of creativity. They will explore the different manifestations of creativity at school and in their everyday lives. They will be reflecting on what creativity means to them, be it make things by themselves or with others, having great ideas, using their imagination, or exploring new things.

Science

KG scientists continue to generate questions and have conversations about the baby chicks. They are growing fast and whenever we visit them we notice new changes. Their feet are growing! They’re getting little tailfeathers! Students record observations in  their science journals. This week our young scientists will not only visit the chicks, but also visit the CAC tortoises to record observations about these very different animals! 

As always, thank you for reading our newsletters and please email us if you any any questions or feedback.

Ms. Ana, Ms. Paola, and Mr. Balazs