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.

 

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