Routines, Games, and Growing Together

Hello all,

Welcome to another week in Kindergarten.  The friends have been getting a lot more practice in mastering the routines of our day.  For example, during our Songs and Poems ritual, it is now the student's jobs to lead the class in singing together as they follow along with the pointer.  

The following are the Songs and Poems from this month.  Have fun learning them at home with your child!

The class is also continuing their practice of learning each others names.  We often play the Name Game, which challenges us to pass the ball to someone who's name we remember.  This is still a challenge for some, so they are getting a lot of practice in asking, "What's your name, again?" to help all of us remember a new name.

The kindergartners are also having a lot of fun meeting new friends on the playground and challenging themselves to try new games and equipment on the yard.

I introduced two new games to the class called, Secret Sounds and Help the Teacher using letter cards.  With Secret Sounds, one student selects a letter card and makes the sound of that letter for the other friends to guess which is the secret letter.  Help the Teacher asks all the students to make the sound of the letter that I am holding up and with their tip, I have to guess the letter.  These are fun games you can play at home with your child to help build their letter-sound recognition!

The class has also been going to their Lego Physics class where they are working in partnerships, building a contraption together by following the diagrams found in their instruction manual.  Talk about patience and concentration!

As we continue to build on our social skills, I asked the friends to help generated a brainstorm What Makes a Good Friend?  Check out what some of their thoughts were below.  If you'd like to come in and see their personal responses, come in and check out their writing journal when you get the chance!

Math is everywhere!  Friends are fond of checking how many students are at school on any given day and so we made a graph of our results.  Check out our Discussion Notes Binder to see what they had to say about gathering this data.

This week, we also started having Open Choice Time.  This is the time where the students can work independently or with friends on their work in class.  Some of the areas that the friends have tried are writing messages, adding details to their past journal entries, conducting surveys, games and puzzles, and reading.

Here's another fun concentration game you can play at home together, called, What's Missing? You can gather any few trinkets you have laying around the house, display them in front of your child, giving them time to memorize what is in front of them.  Then, cover the trinkets with a fabric and take something away, hiding it in your hand.  Remove the fabric and ask your child, what's missing?

This week, we held a Class Council to continue our practice of Checking In.  When there is a problem, either physical, social, emotional, or communal, the expectation is that friends check in with each other to help fix the problem.  Two friends role played bumping into each other and then checking in with each other to make sure they were ok.  You can see our Class Council Journal for more information.

Thank you to Natasha (Kassadeano's mom) for being our Family Reader this week!

In the afternoons, we often make a list of all the things we could do before our day is over.  Here is an example of that might look like:

I read Babushka's Doll to the class and had them think about a few elements of the story.  With this book, we focused on identifying the different characters in the book, as well as what the moral of the story was, or what we thought the author was trying to teach us about.

We played a few Body Challenge Games this week, including Relay Races and a timed Hula Hoop Game!

The end of our day consists of our Calendar and Journal time, which the students are also becoming in charge of.  Each day a new friend gets a chance to help us cross off a day of the week from our calendar and to count how many days we have been at school.

In other news:  Friends finished the Frozen puzzle from last week's birthday celebration!

Thanks for stopping by!

Love, Gaby