If you have friends or family with upcoming Kindergarten-aged students, please share what you love about our school! We will be having an open house to see Kindergarten in action on Thursday, February 8th from 8:15-9:00 or 2:15-3:00. Feel free to invite any families that have expressed interest in our school.
As always, families can also call Mrs. Frischmann at 766-6116 to set up individual tours.
Important Dates and Reminders:
Feb. 12th: 100th Day of School- please send 100 snack items by Friday :)
Feb. 14th: Pink, White and Red Day
Feb 16th: Funky Friday
February 22nd and 23rd: NO SCHOOL
Math: So I realize that in almost every blog I mention the students being fluent within 5 for addition and subtraction. This is a huge and important skill for Kindergarten that requires LOTS of repeated practice. To be truly fluent with math facts research says students need to be shown an equation and solve it within 3 seconds without the use of counting, fingers or tools. This is hard work!
Each day we do things during math time to build our fluency. The image below shows math skills in an "iceberg model" to show the different strategies students need to use and master before they reach the "tip" of the iceberg, which is seeing an equation and solving it fluently.
The games we play and activities we do focus heavily on the informal and pre-formal section of the iceberg because we want students to relate the visual representations they create with tools and see on game pieces directly to an equation so they can solve them quickly. I hope this sheds some light on why I often repeat myself when talking about fluency activities!
Reading: Readers learn to be problem solvers! Even when they get to unknown words in their books, they can use lots of strategies to figure out a word. Here are some of the ways we solve words:
Writing:Writers will pick one piece of writing to publish this week. They will use the following charts to help them revise and edit their books.
On Friday, we are inviting our 2nd grade buddies in to listen to our how to books and test out the directions! The kindergartners will create props for their buddies to to use while following the directions of their how to books. It will be quite the celebration!
Science: This week in science we will put together our knowledge of plants and animals and will select a topic we'd like to learn more about. We will then do some research on our topic using books and iPads and find a way to present our learning to the class. Some options might be: making a poster or writing a book.
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