This week in reading workshop we talked about how many books have patterns.  They have a predictable structure and repetitive language which can help a reader figure out unknown words.  We discussed types of patterns: repeating words and question and answer.  We read books together and looked for patterns.  We talked about how good readers use context clues to figure out an unknown word.
In writing workshop we continued to work on writing true stories that include details such as: who was there, what happened, where did it take place, and how the writer felt about it.  We have been discussing and using the kindergarten narrative writing checklist as a a guide.  We refer to it before the children go off to write independently.  It reminds them to include details, to write a beginning, middle, and end of their story, and to make their writing easy for a reader to read.  This means writing letters for the sounds you hear in words, using finger spaces,  making it neat, and remembering to use capitalization and punctuation.
In math this week we practiced counting in a variety of ways: by ones, twos, and tens.  We also looked for patterns on a hundreds chart.  We worked on putting numbers 1-20 in order starting at different increments.  We practiced sorting buttons by their attributes into groups of two and four, then counted them.

The children are very excited about Charlotte's Web being the book that our whole school is reading at the same time!  The kick-off assembly was lots of fun.  I have included a link to the video of the assembly as well as other resources for our Slingerlands One School One Book project.  slingerlandsoneschoolonebook.weebly.com