During the month of October we were busy in our literacy and math centers learning & practicing:

 

• Alphabet: identifying uppercase and lowercase letters
• Phonics: rhyming words, nouns/verbs, beginning sounds, Ipad phonics games
• Word Work: activities/games that make working with our sight words fun.
• Reading: use of sight word books to introduce common words in an easy-to-read format with non-high-frequency words. Repeated use will lead to greater fluency, reading rate, and reader confidence.
• Writing: drawing detailed pictures to represent ideas & labeling our illustrations.  We have begun to write sentences using our sight words such as "I like my...I can see...We have a..."
• Math: Patterns, graphing, identifying and counting with the numbers 0-10; working with ten-frames to develop our subitizing skills, the ability to “instantly see how many” and greater/less than. This skill plays a fundamental role in the development of our understanding of numbers.

 

SCIENCE: Living & Non-living

PUMPKINS

 

 

Most children can almost always tell you what things are living and what things are non-living, but they cannot tell you why. In this unit we discuss and learn about the needs of all things living; sun, air, water, and food. We learn that if something is "dead" then that means it had to be "alive" first. This is a very tricky concept for kindergarteners to grasp. I find it best to have the children explore these concepts through investigating and studying living things and their life cycles. And since it is Fall why not take a closer look at apples, pumpkins, and bats. We just completed our exciting study and investigation of pumpkins. The children began their research by reading many fiction and nonfiction books about pumpkins and their life cycle, as well as viewing several fun videos.



 

We spent several days working with our very own pumpkins and had a blast labeling it's parts, measuring and exploring them. Part of our study had the children working hard to scoop out all the seeds and using them to practice their estimating skills. But the best part of our week long investigation was predicting if our pumpkins would sink or float....and then performing an actual experiment to prove or disprove our predictions. The children absolutely LOVED the sink or float activity! We ended our investigation by sampling pumpkin pie, pumpkin donuts, and roasted pumpkin seeds that we scooped out of our pumpkins. 





www.teacherspayteachers/Jessica Jaramillo






 

 

 

 

Remember a good way to reinforce your child's education is to practice their ABC chart and sight words nightly. Also, it is important that your child practices writing both their names with the first letter being uppercase and the rest lowercase.

 

We are loving kindergarten life at Bayview!! September has been a tremendously successful month for all of us. The children adjusted quickly to our day-to-day routines and procedures and they understand our classroom rules and expectations (with a little help from Mr. Potato Head).

 

Many new friendships have been formed and we have shared many laughs together. I could not be any prouder of my kindergarteners and am looking forward to an incredible year with them!

 The children have officially begun working together as groups in learning centers. They are doing a fabulous job using the daily rotation chart to find which centers they go to each day. Furthermore, they are learning to work together with different children each week in order to successfully complete their "center work". It is quite beautiful to watch them navigate through this part of their day independently (well almost independently).

Center Time is basically literacy based and teaches the children independence and gives them the skills needed to create a lifetime love of reading and writing. Once the children have been introduced to all the tasks and they're fully engaged in reading and writing, I will be able to meet with small groups and conference with individual students. This structure is effective, the results are amazing, and the children really look forward to centers.
 
During September, the children have been introduced to the following centers:

ABC center:
students work with a variety of alphabet activities.

Phonics Center:
reinforce specific skills/concepts students are learning in class like parts of speech, sentence structure, sequencing, creating words, word families, phonemic awareness, and working with morphemes.
  Word Work:
students will be working in a variety of ways with their sight words to ensure they are easily and quickly recognized.

Listening Center:

students listen to texts from books related to topics being studied in class, topics of interest to students, and books read in class.

 Read & Write the Room:
Students select a pointer to use to read words, poems, graphs, and any other text displayed in the classroom, as well as writing down words they find displayed.  Mini-clipboards, writing tablets, and fun pens make this center very enticing! 

Poetry Center:: 
students have an opportunity to read, write, illustrate, and share poems.

Math Center:
students play math games, work with manipulatives, and learn through hands-on discovery. They read math based stories and solve word problems as a group.

 

 

We had a fun start to fall by celebrating Johnny Appleseed's birthday, learning all about apples, and  tasting apples, apple pie and apple sauce. After creating a class graph, we easily determined that apple pie is our class' favorite way to eat apples.  Of course!!

We watched many videos about the life cycle of an apple tree, as well as read several books on the topic. We worked as a class to sequence the stages of an apple tree and label the parts of an apple thanks to Growing Kinders webpage. With all this apple "talk", the children were very excited to share their personal apple picking stories with each other. As a culminating activity to our study of apples, we created a life cycle of an apple tree craft.

 

www.orientaltrading.com

 

www.makinglearningfun.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello Kindergarteners!

Welcome to Bayview's Kindergarten class of 2014-2015!

 

We are going to have a fun and exciting year that will be filled with magical adventures in learning. Our days are filled with stories, letters, phonics, numbers, writing, and many other activities and memories. I cannot wait to begin this awesome journey with you and have a front row seat as I watch all of you blossom and grow. You are going to make new friends, new memories, and YOU are going to be AMAZING!! 

 

 

 

Science

Playing with ramps and things that roll help children learn simple principles of physical science and engineering. During this science unit, the class engaged in fun activities to build and investigate together. The students used their math, writing, reading, science, and collaborative skills to investigate different balls and ramps. They worked independently and in groups when building ramps and discovering what happens when ramps are tweaked a little. Will the ball roll faster or slower? What happens when you raise or lower the ramp?  It is such a fun way to observe and verbalize the differences in a variety of balls. 

 

Math

Decomposing numbers

We spent a great deal of time learning and understanding composing and decomposing numbers. Truly understanding and investigating numbers helps children develop better number sense; therefore it is so important to work with numbers in a variety of ways. Decomposing numbers means breaking down numbers into their parts. Common Core standards has kindergarten students decomposing numbers in two ways. The first is to decompose numbers into their tens and ones (focus on numbers 11-19) and the second is to show how any number 1-10 can be created using a variety of addends. 

Therefore, the children worked with numbers in different ways to fulfill this standard:

•  First they used objects and words to show that teen numbers have a group of ten and some ones.
• Then they expressed this break down using equations.

 

Addition & Subtraction

We finished our unit on addition and subtraction and had some fun with it. The children read and solved many addition and subtraction story problems, played many online and hands on computation games, as well as writing another class book: If You Were A Minus Sign. In this latest class book the children wrote, illustrated and solved their own subtraction stories much like those presented in the book If You Were A Minus Sign by Trisha Speed Shaskan. I am still amazed at how well they grasped this concept. Although we will soon be moving on to our shapes unit, we will continue to strengthen our computation skills throughout the remainder of the school year.

mrsriccaskindergarten.blogspot.com

 

Literacy: Vowels

 

We finally introduced and studied all the consonants in the alphabet and have moved on to our vowels. It's important that children learn the difference between a consonant and vowel, the sounds for each vowel, and that every word must have a vowel. They are the "glue" that holds our words together. Vowels can be abstract and challenging for some children at this young age, so it is important to make learning these letters fun. I typically spend one week on each vowel and introduce them in the order a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y.
For the past several weeks, the children have learned many poems, songs, and games while working with the vowels a, e, and i. They've engaged in fun activities such as "I Have, Who Has" games for each vowel, Roll and Read CVC words games, BINGO, completed short vowel word/picture sorts, and read several short vowel emergent readers. We even sung a fun song that helps the kids learn the short vowel sounds. It is called Vowel Bat and it is sung to the tune of "Batman".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2hXa8dbK3o

 

Chrissy Cox (TPT)

WRITING

April is a favorite month of mine for many reasons, one of them being the change in weather and another being that it is National Poetry month. In kindergarten we learn dozens of songs and poems to help make learning new concepts fun. So it is only fair that after seven months of enjoying reciting these many poems that we write some ourselves. Following the wonderful Bees enrichment program brought to our school by the PTA, I decided to engage the children in writing acrostic poetry about Spring. Acrostics are fun poems that anyone can write because they don’t need to rhyme, and each line can be as long or as short as you want it to be. We read the beautifully illustrated  book Spring: An Alphabet Acrostic by Steven Schnur to help familiarize ourselves with acrostic poetry. We then brainstormed as many words and phrases as we could think of that pertained to spring. Finally, my poets were ready to create their first Acrostic poems and I must say they are brilliant. Our It's "Bee"ginning to Look Like Spring acrostic poems are on display in the hall accompanied by our beautiful 3-D bees.

                                        TheHappyTeacher                              FallIntoFirst.com

 

LUCK OF THE IRISH

That is exactly what we are hoping for this week. The children excitedly prepared all week to work with their groups to build their leprechaun traps. The groups were responsible for bringing in all needed materials, designing a plan, and finally the fun part of building their traps. They are hoping to catch one of these tricky little fellows so that we may get his pot of gold and be granted wishes. Log on to our  kidblog page by clicking on the link below to see what our wishes would be if we are successful.

http://kidblog.org/MrsSilversteinsClass/dbfe1806-3345-4589-ba15-ae0417c1c939/89/

 

Working with Words

The children and I continue to create and recognize CVC words on a daily basis. At this point, remarkably the children are able to read almost all CVC words they come across. It was time then to touch upon long vowel sounds using Silent e; also known as Magic e. It's amazing what a small amount of exposure to this spelling rule will do for some of the children's decoding abilities. The children were able to see the power Magic "e" has on his fellow vowels by viewing this cute YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oA4wfUBak&feature=share

We will continue identifying & working with Silent/Magic e in our words throughout the remainder of the school year.

Reading and writing

The children listened to many stories about St. Patrick's Day. They learned about many things surrounding this day like clovers, shamrocks, shillelaghs, and of course the mythical tricky leprechauns. Many questions were asked about these wee folks and their pots of gold; some of which we needed to research. What the children were most interested in was catching a leprechaun, so most of our research was about that.  They did however, spend some time sequencing stories, writing about what is more important to them than gold, and sorting shamrock word families. But it wasn't hard to see that their minds were anxiously creating the plans to make the perfect leprechaun traps.

READ ACROSS AMERICA WEEK

& 

Dr. Seuss' Birthday

To kick off Read Across America Week the whole school participated in a pep rally. The lower grades created different styles of Dr. Seuss themed hats to show their enthusiasm. Pictured below is the kindergarten Thing hats. The children looked absolutely adorable. You can view Bayview's kickoff celebration by logging onto the Middletown Township's school district website or Bayview's website. Many of our friends and their writing made it onto the big screen. :)

http://middletownk12.org/site/default.aspx?PageID=1

clearlykindergarten.com

 

Working with Words

Dr. Seuss is known as the King of Rhyme. So how could we not celebrate this magical man without perfecting our own rhyming skills. The children spent the week happily creating words and nonsense (Dr. Seuss) words that rhymed. It appears that we have several rhyming kings and queens in kindergarten. :)

Reading and Writing

It's almost guaranteed that the most beloved characters of Dr. Seuss are Thing 1 and Thing 2. They are magically mischievous and the children are instantly drawn to them. Whenever I read Dr. Seuss' Cat In The Hat, Thing 1 & Thing 2 get the biggest reaction from my class, along with the Cat's Thingamajig mobile. All the excitement that surrounds these two colorful characters lends itself to many fantastical conversations amongst the children. What would a day spent with Thing 1 & Thing 2 look like? You would get a chuckle or two from some of their written responses. I certainly did!

 

Blogging Spotlight

The children continue to blog their responses to questions related to our weekly themes. Dr. Seuss's birthday was the perfect opportunity to practice our opinion writing skills. The children had the fabulous opportunity of reading and listening to many of Dr. Seuss' books throughout the week; especially those read by our Mystery Readers. And they all had an opinion & a reason as to which books they liked better than others. Naturally the blog prompt had to be:

Which is your favorite Dr. Seuss book and why?

Please log on to our kidblog page by clicking on the link below to read your child's post.

http://kidblog.org/MrsSilversteinsClass/wp-admin/post.php?post=36&action=edit

 

Culminating Activity

To end our very exciting week, we spent that Friday comparing the book and movie version of Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears A Who! The best part was our movie snack of choice: Green eggs.

A special thank you goes out to all our Mystery Readers who surprised us during Read Across America week. The children & I are still talking about your visits & probably will be for days to come. Thank you!