Last Stop on Market Street

Today in class, we began our day with the reading portion of MAP testing. My kinders did WONDERFUL! They all took their time to do their best and I was so proud of how well they logged on, listened to the questions and tried their best! In reading, I read the class a story called Last Stop On Market Street. This beautiful story was about a boy named CJ and his grandmother who take a bus ride every Sunday where they go to church and take the bus to a soup kitchen to volunteer their time to help serve food to those in need. They don't have a car and CJ expresses his admiration to his grandmother and bummed out attitude when they have to take the bus. On the bus ride to the soup kitchen CJ's grandmother teaches him how to find beauty and gratitude in their everyday world, even with poverty and urban challenges. This story had a beautiful message and the class loved it! After we did a comprehension activity to ensure they were understanding the story as we read it and we did a cute activity that went along with it. For the activity, I gave the kids a piece of paper with a head outline. I asked them to make the outline to be a picture of themselves and showed them how to add eyes, a nose, mouth, detail to the ears, eyebrows and hair. They had so much fun turning the outline into a portrait of them using realistic colors for their eyes, skin and hair. Next, I gave them some paper glasses, on the left it said something people see with a cloud with rain. On the right side, I asked them to draw something they would see if they saw rain what could they find that's beautiful from it or gratitude in the moment. They did a great job drawing something and had so much fun adding lots of fun detail. They were excited to bring them home to share with all of you. We talked a lot in this lesson about how important it is to walk through life and find the beauty in it and be thankful for the things we have. We live in a beautiful place with beautiful people who give a lot of themselves to help others. Here is the class with their gratitude sunglasses project:

In math, I partnered the class up to play "Boom, Boom, Clap Subtratton." They LOVED it and had so much fun practicing subtraction within 5. They are starting to know them by memory and not needing to use their fingers to get the answers. The answer is becoming automatic when I give them a subtraction sentence. Way to go, K-1! It was a great day!

Middle of April,....Already? WOW!

I can't believe it's the middle of April already but wow....my kindergarten friends' work sure shows it! They have become such confident readers and writers and I am amazed every single day! Today in class we did a spring directed draw and I asked the class to write about what they like to do in spring or the things they notice that they love in spring. Their drawings were stunning and their writing was WONDERFUL! Wow, K-1! I am so proud of them!

In HMH, we have been reading books with the theme "Home of the Free and Brave." Today we read a book title Happy Birthday to the U.S. This was a great book about America's birthday and we learned many important facts about the beautiful country we live in. We also learned that good readers visualize when they read and to do this they use their 5 senses. We talked about what they means and we practiced this important skill where I told them a few different stories and we talked about what they saw, heard or smelled as I said the story out loud. They had fun learning how to "visualize" and the loved sharing what they pictured in their minds. Great job, K-1! To go along with this book, we did a mini-book that went along with this perfectly. They had so much fun reading the mini-book as a class and highlighted all the "heart words" we found. Then I paired up the class into partners and they got to read the book by themselves to their partner and taking turns. I LOVED walking around and hearing them read the book to one another. They are becoming quite the readers!

In math, we are just finishing up sorting by attributes. They are doing wonderful learning this math concept and are doing great practicing this skill on their own. They learned they can sort things by one attribute but they can also look at a group of objects and there can be many different ways they can sort them by many different attributes such as by: shape, size, color, number pattern, etc. This was a quick math unit and they did a great job with it! We finished our 2nd math book and I sent it home with my friends earlier in the week. They can keep it at home and it doesn't need to come back.

In social studies, we are learning about wants vs. needs. They are learning that needs are things that they have to have to survive such as food, water, shelter, clothing, etc. They learned that wants are things that they like to have but don't necessarily need to live such as video games, toys, soda, Ipads, etc. I am so proud of how well they have learned this important concept in social studies and how well they can explain both things when asked what the difference is. Yay, K-1!