February Scholastic Book Club

February's Book Club orders will be due Friday, Feb. 10th.  You can send orders in with checks anytime before the 10th or place your order online.

Click on the links below for a short video highlighting the books available in the Feb. order forms.  Remember, our class earns points for books every time you order!



A Video Introduction to February's See Saw Book Club


A Video Introduction to February's Fire Fly Book Club

This Week in Kindergarten (January 23-26)

Partner Reading Using our New "Check" to "Check for Understanding"

Playing "Find My Number"

Putting ABC Magnets in ABC order

Independent Reading using a Fluency Phone

Book Making

ABC Magnet Boards for ABC Order

Rainbow Writing

This Week's Shared Reading, "A Frog"
Focusing on the "og" word family.

Practicing the ABC's in Sign Language

Using Tally Marks to record #'s of Books and/or Poems read

This Week in Kindergarten (January 9-13)

This Week in Reading:

• This week I introduced our first reading log.  Students make a pile of books as they read them, and then count the number of books read at the end of independent reading time.  They record how many books on a book log labeled with each day of the week.  We do this to help stay engaged in our books, keep track of our reading, and build our stamina.
• We are working on tapping out CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words.  Homework will be sent home weekly for a while for students to practice tapping our sounds to read words.  Use the word lists sent home at the beginning of Unit 3 in the Fundations Letter.
• We are recognizing/reading/writing word family words.  For example: pet, jet, vet, wet, get
• Many students are now reading books with dialogue.  We are paying attention to when we see talking (quotation) marks and reading the word "said".  

This Week in Writing:

• Our new writing ditty is:  

Think, think, think

Touch and Tell

Write 

and Revise, and Revise!

• We think of a small moment from our lives, touch each page as we tell the story across the pages to plan how the story will go.  We then start writing using all we know about letters/sounds/words to get our ideas down on the paper.  When "finished" we go back into our book, read it to make sure it makes sense and revise to "fix it up", and add details to our words and pictures.  We are using "revision pencils" to add to our books.  The revision pencils are colored pencils.  This helps us to see the work students do to make their good books great!

This Week in Math:

• We created and discussed two graphs this week.  We graphed our pets and found out that the pet that most people in our class have is a cat.  The pets that the fewest people have are snakes and hamsters.  We also made a graph of our favorite cookie type snack in class.  We found out that most people in our class like chocolate chip teddy grahams the best.
• We've been working hard on reading, drawing, and writing out number problems using the addition and subtractions symbols.

Just Right Books

The following two paragraphs from the WCS Literacy Blog by Literacy Teacher Leader, Janet Anderson describe the importance of "Just Right Books".

You can find the whole write up if you go to: http://wcsliteracy.blogspot.com/

Reading requires practice in just-right books so that the reader can develop the process involved in integrating the 3 sources of information [meaning, language structures and visual/print cues]. This process can be observed when a reader reads smoothly and with expression. The voice is not robotic but combines words into phrases that sound like a talking voice. The reader should laugh at the funny parts and react when the story reveals a surprise. The reader may also quickly correct errors or reread to make it sound better.

Reading books that are too hard will force the student to stutter and stumble on unknown words, lose the meaning, and over-rely on sounding out the words, letter by letter. This interferes with the developing reading process and may actually break it down by creating bad habits that are difficult to correct.

Books that are not too easy and not too hard are Just Right. These books build strong reading habits that will lead to a life-long love of reading.

This Week in Kindergarten (January 3-6)

Book Making!!!!

We Read EVERYDAY!!!

Adding lots of details to the illustrations to help
with the reading.

Adding Illustrations to This Week's Shared
Reading: "A Hunting We Will Go"

Fun in the Snow!

   

We Love the Snow!

Exploring Symmetry by making Snowflakes

The Raft Game
Objective: To reinforce counting by 5's and introduce exchange
through a game.

The Raft Game
Using objects to represent numbers and
make exchanges.

A Day in Art Class

Look for the finished Masterpieces in the Williams-Cone hallway.

Reviewing "Collage" Concepts