It's been another busy week in kindergarten!

This week in reading workshop we started talking about non-fiction texts and why an author would write this type of book.  The author wants to teach us true facts, or information about a topic.  We talked about text features and how the information is organized.  We read non-fiction books as careful detectives looking for text features.  The children also made the connection between the non-fiction books we read and the How-To books we are writing.

In writing workshop we are writing How-To books.  We talked about how they are different than fiction stories because they are true.  Also, How-To books 1. Tell what to do, in steps, 2. Number the steps, 3. Have a picture for each step, 4. Label the pictures to teach even more information.  We discussed many things that the children know how to do, and how to break down a task into steps; touching and telling the steps across the pages.  The children shared their books with a partner and gave each other feedback on how to make their writing even better.

In math we continued our unit on subtraction.  The children practiced using counters and cubed to listen to subtraction stories and solve the problems.  We practiced using the minus sign and solving differences.  The children had practice subtracting from groups of five playing a game with a partner.  They each started out with five beans, then spun the spinner to see what they were to subtract:  -1, -2, -3, or -4.  They then had to write the correct math sentence on their paper.  Here is a great video for practicing subtraction through 5 (which they should know fluently by the end of the year):

Five Finger Jive song