Week Twenty One: January 8th-12th

Hello kindergarten families! Our week in the classroom was wonderful and full of many great learning experiences! We began our "Artist in Me" unit and the first artist we studied was Wassily Kandinsky.  Kandinsky's art mainly consists of shapes including circles, squares, triangles, and lines.  This tied in perfectly with our geometry unit we began this week.  We studied 2-D and 3-D shapes and learned all about sides, vertices, faces, and edges.

Announcements:

January 15th: No school: Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!
January 26th: No school: Teacher Workday
January 29th: No school: Teacher Workday
February 6th 10:00 AM: Artist in Me Gallery Crawl...come and see your child's artwork displayed around our classroom!  They will also sing a song about all 5 artists that we learned about.  We will also have refreshments.
February 13th: Field Trip to the Laurel's Nursing Home (10:30-11:30)
February 14th 1:00 PM: Valentine's Reading Party...come read your child's Valentine's poems with them that they received from other classmates! 

Math:

We began our geometry unit this week in math!  We are studying both 2-D and 3-D shapes.  The 2-D shapes we learned are circle, rectangle, square, triangle, oval, trapezoid, diamond/rhombus, and hexagon.  The 3-D shapes we learned are cone, cube, cylinder, sphere, pyramid, and rectangular prism.  We are working on the students being able to identify, describe, and draw/build these shapes.  We played a game called "What's My Shape?" The students played the game in pairs and one student had a whiteboard and marker and the other student was the guesser.  The student drew a shape on their board without the other student seeing it.  The other student asked questions such as "Does the shape have 4 sides? Does the shape have 6 vertices? Does the shape have 3 vertices?" until they were able to guess the shape.  They LOVED this game!

Literacy:

In literacy this week, we began two new activities including sight word mini-books and word sorts.  As mentioned in the email I sent out on Tuesday, students will learn one sight word per week and that will be our "word of the week".  Each student will then get a sight word book and will go through and highlight that word wherever they see it in the book. We read this book as a class and in small groups multiple times so they should be able to read the book to you when they bring it home.  These books have basic pattern sentences in them where only one or two words change on each page.  This helps the students with being able to read the books and also use the picture to determine the unknown word.  We also started word sorts this week.  This came home on a sheet of computer paper where they sorted pictures into four different letter categories.  We started with this one as a whole class but as we continue each week with these, I will differentiate and students will be doing different ones based on their needs.  This week, students sorted the pictures based off of the initial consonant that the picture started with.  They did great with this activity! 

Thematic:

We began our Artist in Me unit this week with Kandinsky.  Students learned that his artwork included many different shapes.  Students got to recreate three of his pieces of artwork that will be displayed at our gallery crawl.  Students used different art mediums (crayons, colored pencils, paint, etc.) to create their pieces of artwork.  Many of these activities also practice their cutting which is always a great fine motor skill activity.  

Science:

Students got to continue exploring with the classroom science materials (pipettes, test tubes, eye droppers, beakers, and measuring tubes) during morning activities and during free choice centers.  This center is a hit!  Thanks to Sue Sink who came and did our Sci-Fri this past Friday!  We would love for more parents to come and do a science experiment with the class. It does not have to be anything complicated at all. :) Simple is best!

Have a great Sunday!
Love,
Mrs. James