We're back for another year in the busy beehive! This year, we started on a Wednesday and had three full days to get down our class rules, routines, and understand and learn about our classroom community. We made first day of Kindergarten hats, signed our names for the first time, and even made a special present for our families (who were more sad to let us go than we were!) You can find these in our freebies!
During our first full week of school, we learned some basic routines and learning practices for center time, writing, and morning work. We also began our first themes, All About Me, Fall Seasons and Apples, and The Five Senses.
Here we are, using another one of The Kindergarten Smorgasboard's creations. In order to understand the importance of, and especially for understanding how to color and draw slowly, neatly and within the constraints of lines, we colored a soccer ball. The students were shown a demo with quick carless coloring and a comparison to quick, careless letter writing. The students discovered they couldn't read those careless letters and that we should be very neat and purposeful when we write.
We jumped right into rhyming and used pictures to match ambulances with rhyming words.
On our first week, we are just learning to match lowercase and uppercase letters. We use the phonics program Fundations and had just met our little puppet Echo the owl. This meeting made this center so much fun! We matched the baby owls or lowercase letters to the parent owls or the Uppercase letters. We used our resource alphabet strips to check unknown pairs.
We learned three letters our first week, t, f, and b. At centers, we used wipe off markers to search and find our letters of the week among other letters.
Another alphabet center this week was the game Buzz! The children use a stack of letter cards that include 5 bumble bees and a wipe off alphabet chart. Each player takes a letter card, reads the letter and traces its counterpart on their sheet. The first person to complete their sheet wins!
We also started using Alphabet Bootcamp this year from The Kindergarten Smorgasboard. After we learn the letter, name, sound, and formation of each new letter, we open our bootcamp books and create a web of words we know that begin with our letter. The bees who are new to schooling draw pictures of the words, while others draw the picture and copy my spelling. Such a perfect activity that really solidifies the learning of the letter and its connection to things around us! I love that we're also practicing endurance, turn taking when speaking, and different styles of lines and letter writing!
Teacher version of the circle webs.
Math Centers
Our first week of math centers is all about number ID and quantification. We also practice number writing each and every week at at least one center. Here's a friend playing the cookie monster number recognition game (similar to moose). He picks a cookie, says the number and writes it. If he gets a cookie monster, he puts back all of his collected cookies and erases his board. Winner has collected, identified, and written the most numbers!
Number tracing while we sing our number formation chant. Here, were practicing naming the numbers, creating them appropriately, and holding our writing tools appropriately.
We're learning shape names and formations in math as well. For our shape center, we learned how to roll dice, read the amount, and graph using our shape tracing paper. We played until one of the shapes reached the top of the graph and was the winner!
We began to get into the halloween spirit with our number quantities center. We used our fine motor skills to attach paperclips to the number on each card representing the shown amount of candy.
During arrival and morning work time, the students have been working on wipe off name writing plates. When the bees are able to write their names with one capital and the remaining lowercase letters consistently in the morning and throughout the day, they are given their own morning journal. These journals are used to write one story a day on anything the students desire. It also serves as a WONDERFUL pieces of evidence for work sampling!
Pictures of their journals are coming soon!
Happy beginning of the year!
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