Here it the video that Ms. Stone and our QAE community created to send the Seahawks off to the Superbowl! Go Hawks!!
I left school yesterday feeling a bit tired, but really appreciative of the celebrations we engage in as a QAE learning community. After missing a big chunk of last week, and experiencing a good deal of heart ache for Jeffrey Riley and his family (not to mention a bit of anxiety about my husband's heart surgery ~ which he is still recovering from amazingly well), it felt really good to be back with my kindergarteners this week! They are so full of life and love and curiosity and creativity ~ and they love to celebrate! In addition to our literacy, math and science learning, we did a lot of celebrating. On Thursday, we celebrated the civil rights leadership work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at our all school assembly. Thursday evening, many of us celebrated our QAE family community by sharing a meal together at the annual Spaghetti Feed. On Friday, we celebrated our strong listening skills with a Marble Jar Celebration and we celebrated that the Seahawks are heading back to the Superbowl at our all school sendoff party! We also continued to celebrate the daily examples of perseverance we find all around us ~ in our books, our friends, our families and our selves! At the beginning of kindergarten, we use a learning station model for our morning learning. As the year progresses, and the learning maturity and stamina of our students increases, we extend the time of these stations. Most recently, students have been traveling through four station rotations, each lasting for 15 minutes. In the spring, we transition from the station model into a workshop model. The workshop model spreads the activities students engage in out over several days, providing students with longer periods of engagement at each activity (20 - 25 minutes) and providing teachers with more opportunities for targeted, differentiated instruction. We have decided to transition to our workshop model early this year, as our learners are ready for it! Knowing that this is a significant change of routine for the kids, we will take things slowly this week, walking the kids through the new routine. They love the Readers' and Writers' Workshop routines we have been doing in the afternoon, so I am confident that they will quickly adjust. This is how it will look...
In the afternoons, we will continue to do Writers' Workshop, Science, our Project Based Learning activities, Class Meetings and - of course - Choice Time! Mark you calendars! |
Since the first day of school we have been talking about what it means to be kind, safe, and fair and how we are the same and different from the people in our lives and from people all over the world. During the next two weeks, we will talk about the civil rights work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We will watch a BrainPop Jr video, read several books, learn two poems and have discussions about how our world has changed for the better because of brave and persevering people like Dr. King. If you are interested in extending this important learning at home, here is a great resource. http://www.tolerance.org/activity/dos-and-donts-teaching-black-history |
On Friday, we will have an all school MLK assembly (time still to be announced - I will post when I have it). Please join us if you are able.
Reading & Retelling Childrens' Choice books
Last week, we talked about how readers retell stories and practiced retelling the Childrens' Choice books we are reading together. Check out the audio retells added to our 1/6 blog post and stay tuned for more audio retells to be posted before the CC Award vote in March.
The Kindergarten Common Core Student Standards expect K readers to be able to understand Key Ideas and Details in the stories we read. Specifically, with prompting and support we want them to be able to:
Our Readers' Workshop will focus on retelling later in the year, so this will be an early attempt at this challenging skill. By the end of the year, I want all of my students to be able to retell what happened in the beginning, middle and end of a book, and be able to include details about the setting and characters (how they felt, why they did what they did). For these early attempts, however, the students may not meet all of these standards, but we didn't want that to hold us back from sharing our ideas for this authentic and motivating purpose. Enjoy and feel free to leave us comments! |
We Are Scientists Exploring Fabric!
Last week, we launched our first science unit ~ Exploring Fabric! We used our senses to explore the properties of 10 different kinds of fabric: organza, corduroy, seersucker, fleece, nylon, burlap, satin, terrycloth, knit & denim. The students noticed how the fabrics looked (shiny, sparkly, see through) and felt (soft, smooth, slippery, scratchy, rough) and sounded (like bats wings) and smelled (hmm - fabric "explored by lots of other kindergarteners prior to us did not smell so great!) and recorded their observations during our Science writing workshop time using pictures and words. We used feely boxes to compare how our fabrics are the same and different and went on a fabric hunt to help us match different fabrics. We also put different fabrics together to make fabric collages. |
In Kindergarten, I have already learned to ... Miles: Write! Mia: How to jump rope at recess. Jude: How to write. Xabi: To be a really good player at soccer at recess. Max: How to read. Alex: How to be kind, safe, and fair. Hazel: How to be kind, safe, and fair. Jocelyn: How to write. Lewis: How to play soccer. Noah: How to read a book. Eli: How to read. Glory: How to write and be kind to people I don't know. Remy: How to do math. Nora: That friendship can be magic. Siena: How to write. Claudia: How to do Raz-Kids. Connor: That you have to have voices off. Henry: Rachel: To be kind, safe, and fair. Elena: How to do writer's workshop. Aleena: To be kind, safe, and fair. Ami: How to be kind. Olin: To help people when they have a problem. Olivia: Write. | Next, I want to learn ... How to solve problems. Drawing better at home and at school. To read better. How to spell. To be really nice. How to write stories! How to listen and be in control. How to read a chapter book. About space. How to write better. How to write. To read a chapter book. How to read big chapter books. How to play new games that I don't know yet. How to get at math. About fabric and how to use it. Quick math. How to spell tricky words. How to do reader's workshop. How to not distract my sister when she's doing her homework. How to learn how to read all the books in my book bag. To ride my bike without training wheels. How to unicycle and read. |
Mr. Jeffrey will be asking us to vote in March for our favorite three books from all of the fabulous books below that have been nominated for the 2015 Childrens' Choice Award. We know some of the books and plan to read the rest together to make sure we make our best voting choices. Stay tuned as we use our speaking and writing to review these books as we read them, retelling our blog readers what each book is about and sharing our opinions about each book. Feel free to leave comments to share your opinions with us, too!
I want to thank you all for your generous holiday gifts and cards. I hope you all have a restful winter break filled with lots of laughter and love.
Please take some time during break to check out the students’ E-Folios for our latest writing posts, including videos of us reading our own writing!
Please take some time during break to check out the students’ E-Folios for our latest writing posts, including videos of us reading our own writing!
I have been out the past two days at some leadership trainings, and will be out again on Monday to do future PBL planning with the Kindergarten teaching team. I feel fortunate to be able do this professional development, but really miss being in class with the kids. Fortunately, Ms. Wiegand is in our classroom every Friday and Monday, so she can fill in for me when these opportunities come up. We have been busy finishing some important learning units before Winter Break. For the last two weeks, the students have been evolving quickly as writers who can write true stories about their lives that readers can actually read! We will be publishing a narrative piece at the end of this week by video taping our selves reading one of our stories. We will also continue to build our reading muscles by independently reading our just right books. After break, our morning learning station time will morph into a Readers' Workshop and a Math Workshop structure. We will also be diving into some exciting afternoon Fabric Science exploration. Hour of CodeOn Thursday, some 5th grade students helped our class participate in the hour of code. Coding is not easy work ~ it takes perseverance, patience, and a lot of thinking. The 5th grade buddies and parent helpers were a great resource to us and may have learned a little something themselves about patience when they worked hard to try to "help" and not "tell" the kindergartners what to do. I sadly missed this event, but Ms. Ward shared that she saw many 5th graders and parents re-explaining concepts, using real life examples, and simply letting kids make mistakes. This was a great learning opportunity for all! Thanks to all the parent helpers for coming in! If anyone has any photos of the event that I can post, please send them my way. If your student wants to do more at home, the link is http://code.org/learn/beyond. Two important Art requests from Ms. AmselClassroom Volunteer Our students go to art every Tuesday and Thursday from 1:05 – 1:35. Amanda, our wonderful art teacher, could really use an adult volunteer to help her in class. If you are able to commit to helping her, please let one of us know! Art Portfolio Please send a brown paper bag with handles (the heavy-duty ones like the ones from Whole Foods or Trader Joes) with your students name written on it to school. It will be used to make an art portfolio for your student to keep track of their art for the rest of the year. Progress ReportsProgress reports will be coming home in orange folders at the end of the week. This is your kindergarten student’s first progress report. Progress reports give you information about how your child is progressing academically and socially. There is a wide range of normal in kindergarten! Typically, kindergarten progress reports contain lots of 3’s (right on track as an early learner) and lots of D’s (right on track in transitioning to school routines and social kindergarten behaviors). Please do not feel that 3’s and D’s mean that your child is not amazing and full of potential. It is exactly where we want students to be. | Continuing to explore |
We packed a lot of acts of gratitude into our short month of November, but the performance our kids gave at our last Monday Morning Meeting was by far my favorite! (Thank you, Ms. Stone!!) The video is posted below in case you were not able to see the performance in person. SO wonderful! We also completed our classroom gratitude tree and drew some reflections about the people and things in our world that we wanted to express gratitude for.
I want to express my gratitude for all of you, our amazing Room 203 family members! I have enjoyed connecting with many of you already at our recent conference, talking about how we can work together to support our little learners. I look forward to having this time with the rest of you in the next two days. The amount of learning that this energetic group of kindergarteners has engaged in this fall is amazing, and I feel grateful that I get to facilitate it every day. Thank you all for the adult support you give this learning, both at home and in the classroom.
Enjoy the next few days of family and feasting!
Katie
I want to express my gratitude for all of you, our amazing Room 203 family members! I have enjoyed connecting with many of you already at our recent conference, talking about how we can work together to support our little learners. I look forward to having this time with the rest of you in the next two days. The amount of learning that this energetic group of kindergarteners has engaged in this fall is amazing, and I feel grateful that I get to facilitate it every day. Thank you all for the adult support you give this learning, both at home and in the classroom.
Enjoy the next few days of family and feasting!
Katie
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Reading our own Writing!
We have been busy writing true stories about our lives in Writers' Workshop, adding lots and lots of details to help our readers feel like they are right there in the story with us! All of the students have been excited to use pictures and words to tell these stories. They have been stretching out words and writing the sounds they hear down, excitedly writing pages and pages of words they want to tell the world! At this age, quantity will lead to quality. One of the most powerful things that emergent writers can do is reread their writing. My writers have been working hard to be able to do this challenging work. Last week, the kindergarten writers all chose a piece of their writing that they could read and read it to their 2nd grade reading buddies. Later, we did a gallery walk with our masterpieces, trying to read each others’ writing by stretching out the words and noticing the things that writers did to make their writing easier to read. We also filled out narrative and editing checklists to help us know what we are already doing and what we still need to work on as narrative writers. These stories and checklists will be posted on the students' E-folio writing pages soon. Photos of our writing celebrations are posted below. | |