Celebrating with our 2nd Grade Buddies

Today we wrapped up our unit by working with second grade buddies. The second graders in Mrs. Hukkalah's room have been studying snowflakes and putting them into categories based on their attributes. After your writers shared their best pieces with their second grade buddy, their buddies taught them everything they have learned about snowflakes. They worked together to write pattern books all about snowflakes! I couldn't believe how well they worked together and the amazing effort your writers put in.

Our second grade buddies took the books with them. We will get together in the new year to finish them.

Amazing!

Fawn Friends Write Pattern Books

Your authors have been working on writing pattern books for the past couple of months. This week we worked together to create a "Writing Rubric" to make sure our writing was easy to read.
Here is what we came up with:

Take a look as your learners check their writing against the rubric and give their best effort to make their writing easy to read:

I just can't believe how much your writers have grown this year!
Be looking for all these pieces to come home in the new year.

BUCKLEY!!!!

Today we had our first visit with Buckley during our learning time!! He came in at the perfect time! We are learning to use these blue magnetic folders to strengthen letter/sound knowledge and word building skills. Buckley laid in the center of the rug (helping to keep everyone calm, quiet and focused) and watched as we worked. I'm so excited to have him as a weekly visitor from now on! Children also spent some private time (3 students at a time) singing their ABC's to him :-)

Nothing like a dog to bring some peace and calm!

Third Grade Buddies Teach Us About Michigan

Today we met with our third grade buddies in Mrs. Garza's class for the first time! These third graders were excited to share their maps and books they had written to teach us about Michigan Native Americans. It was so exciting to see how proud our buddies were to share and how engaged we were to listen! Each kindergartener was able to hear from at least 2 or 3 different third graders! Ask your kindergartener if he/she remembers one thing that he or she learned from their buddy.

Combinations of ten using Tens Frames

This week our mathematicians have been working to learn and record combinations of ten using ten beans (white on one side and black on the other) and a tens frame. Working together with their partners they would take turns "rolling" the beans and placing them on the tens frame. They would then apply what we've learned about counting objects and organizing sets to figure out the combinations.
Take a look

I loved seeing the sheets returned with good thinking and recording!! This is a great skill to continue to practice at home :-)

Thinking and Learning Centers Week of Nov 5 and 12

Because of the short weeks our Thinking and Learning Centers have carried over :-)

Vowel Cut and Glue 

Learners in the Fawn Room have been working hard on segmenting words into beginning, middle and ending sounds. This means that given a word such as hat, your child should be able to say each sound /h/ /a/ /t/ and blend it back together to say "hat". When these sheets come home (we have done 'a' and 'i' middle sounds) ask your child to segment these words for you. See if you can come up with other 3 letter words with the same vowel sound for your child to segment for you. This is an end of the year kindergarten expectation. :-)

Here you see readers working to record "Wow" pages from their favorite star books. Your child should be able to tell you what book they recorded out of as well as what they liked about each page they recorded.

Above you see writers recording sentences made up of all pink heart words! The big focus with this work is using careful handwriting with spaces and punctuation. Your writers should also be able to read you these sentences when they bring them home.

Epic!!

This ipad app was purchased by the school and is an amazing way to incorporate technology, reading and science! These scientists have been focusing on nonfiction texts (the app reads to them and highlights the words as it goes) to learn more about fall!

Great thinking going on in the Fawn Room these past two weeks!

Studying Pumpkins AND Sunflowers Consolidating our Learning

I am so impressed with our scientists! Today we used a Venn Diagram to record similarities and differences between pumpkins and sunflowers! Their thinking was amazing and I love making it visible on this diagram! The best part is that we were able to wrap so many facets of science into this one experience. In our discussion we focused on a variety of things from the structure and function, to making claims and finding evidence to support our claims!
We used these nonfiction texts to support our original claims:

We used these non-fiction texts to research and find evidence to support our original claims based on our observations.

This is how we recorded our learning:

At the bottom, in purple, are some claims that were made by some friends. Since we didn't have evidence at our fingertips to support these claims we now have a challenge on our hands!!

Our scientists have decided to take it upon themselves to do some research at home in order to find evidence to support or disprove these claims.

Take a closer look:

Here are some ways we decided you can research to find the evidence.

If you and your scientists are able to find evidence please send it in! Your child should bring both the information discovered as well as information as to how and where the information was found!
Thank you for supporting our science work!

Halloween

 Bracelets!

Haunted Houses

Witches Brew

Shape coloring Haunted Houses

Large Motor Halloween Fun!