This week in writing workshop we continued our unit on narrative writing.  We talked about descriptive language, then compared two versions of the story to see which sounded more interesting.  The children agreed that the story with more detail sounded better.  The children worked with a writing partner to use their best storytelling voice and details when telling their true story.  They then had a chance to ask their partner questions to find out even more details.  They had to be active listeners to make sure their partner told who was in the story, where it took place, what happened, and how they felt.  Telling their story orally helps to organize their thoughts for when they write.

In reading workshop the children practiced reading books with repeating and predictable patterns.  They are so excited when they finish a book.  It is also fun to watch them read with a partner and work together using context and picture clues to figure out unknown words.

In math we continued our practice of counting by multiples of 2 and 10 as well as looking for patterns on a hundreds chart.  Given a pattern the children had to count to figure out what it was, then continue the pattern.  We also learned about estimating using benchmarks of 5, 10, and 20.  The children learned the term 'about' which means close to.  During morning work we also practiced making groups of 7, 9, and 10 by writing addition sentences using counters and white boards.

This week we started talking about our 5 senses and how they help us learn about the world.  We talked about our sense of sight, how it helps us, and things we can do with our sense of sight.  We practiced using our sense of hearing listening to different animal sounds that you would hear at the zoo.  The children then wrote a sentence about what they heard and illustrated it.

On Thursday we had "Dress Like A Farmer Day."  The children donated a dollar to "Kids for Kindness" to help raise money for the Mohawk Hudson Humane Society. It was a bushel of fun!

In the coming weeks children will be invited from our class to have lunch and game time with Mrs. Gaffney and a small group of children.  They play games like Uno and Candyland and will rotate games that can be played quickly and build their cooperation, communication and friendship skills.

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