September Newsletter

Beginning a new year in Kindergarten!

Our Big Idea, which ties back to each unit of the year, is BEGINNINGS. This helps us understand that all things have a beginning and change over time. We’ve discovered that we start to know about people, places, and things by first finding out its name. We just finished our first unit: NAMING. In this unit, students have been learning about the purpose of names in our big, wide, world. We’ve learned to label, identify people in our new school, and the importance of having a name for people and things. Activities that we’ve done with our names include: Making a Name Quilt, magazine name tags, bean name tags, labeling the classroom, and much more. 

Daily 5 and Writer's Workshop

Literacy is a big deal in kindergarten! We have begun our focus on literature through working on comprehension. There are many ways to demonstrate our ability to comprehend text including these examples: asking and answering questions about a story, connecting to a text with personal experiences, and analyzing text through familiar stories. Over the course of the past couple of months, the children have been exposed to many different stories both fiction and nonfiction and have used these comprehension strategies to become readers. The children have also learned that there are three ways to read a book… read the pictures, read the words, and retell the story. This strategy has become very helpful during our Daily 5 literacy time. 

In Kindergarten, we use the Daily 5 model during our literacy time to help us have meaningful reading experiences each day. So far, we have focused on 4 of the Daily 5rotations.   
They are:

• Read to Self (independently)
• Working on Writing (independently) 
• Read to Someone (partner reading)
• Word Work (independently)

Writer’s workshop in Kindergarten is a time for children to learn that they too can be a writer. They have learned their role as a writer, and that writing includes pictures and words. They as writers have learned to choose a topic, draw pictures, add details to their work, label pictures by stretching out words, solve problems, build stamina, and are never done!

Math

Over the past several of weeks in math, we have learned that math is "shapes, colors, numbers, symbols, counting and figuring things out".  We began the year by exploring with various math manipulatives and seeing what our brains could come up with! We then reviewed colors and shapes through a variety of activities. Some of these included a color hunt around our classroom and a shape hunt around the school. In addition to shapes and colors, we have also focused our learning on writing and identifying numerals 0-10 and counting objects. We have loved playing math games and even learned how to subitize (recognizing a number without having to count). Now that we have built a strong foundation of the numbers 0-10, we are starting to compare numbers and use the terminology greater than, less than, and equal to. 

Buddies!

I'm sure by now you’ve heard about our 8th grade buddies! We have had a great time meeting and getting to know them! They practiced reading books together and have played together on the playground! We look forward to morning meetings and lots of fun activities with our new friends! Our new buddies will come visit and work with us once or twice a week for the rest of the year. 

Elemental Forces and our in house Field Trip!!!

We absolutely loved our soil tunnel in school field trip! The amazing ladies from Beaufort County Conservation came to our school and brought a soil tunnel so that we can see what’s happening under the ground. They also brought in live worms for us to hold, observe, and learn about. It was great fun and an exciting way to begin our new unit: Elemental Forces.