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.
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.
