Peek at our week

A few reminders:

*spring pictures are on Monday-only students who return their package order form will have their picture taken

*we are continuing to collect pennies (or any monetary donation) for the Missouri Department of Conservation to help the Monarch Butterflies-thank you to those who have donated so far!

*Scholastic Book Orders are in the Friday Folder, they are due NEXT FRIDAY, March 24th.  You can order online at www.scholastic.com with classroom code FN4GP or return the paper forms with a check to Scholastic Book Clubs.  You only need one check, even if ordering from multiple forms.  CASH NOT ACCEPTED.

Grace and her family donated an entire milk jug full of pennies-WOW!!

A look at our learning...

Fundations: check out the fundations handout in your child's Friday Folder this week and work on it at home.  This will help with their spelling, reading and fluency skills.  Fluency is a BIG part of what we are working on in their reading groups.  

Shared Reading: this week we read the Big Book Bananas Sometimes and the poems Fast as a cheetah and The leprechaun song.  They featured our word wall words of the week: look, as.

Next week's spelling words: 

she

he

Math: this week we finished our Bunk Beds and Apple Boxes unit that focused on decomposing numbers.  Decomposing numbers is the process of separating numbers into their components.  Example:  10 can be made the following ways 0+10, 1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5.  You can see some of their Apple Boxes work in their Friday Folder today.  

Writing: it has been such an EXCITING week in our classroom during writing workshop this week!  Over the last 5 weeks Miss Nemechek and I have chosen what non-fiction topics the class would learn about (penguins and butterflies) and front-loaded the children with information via books and video clips.  Then they took the information they learned and wrote their own "fact books" on those topics.  This week, however, the KIDS chose what topic they wanted to research.  Each child could choose a different topic.  Ask your child what topic they are researching.  

On Monday, they researched their topics on PebbleGo.  PebbleGo is a digital database for the earliest of readers.  They took notes on what they learned while listening to PebbleGo.  
On Tuesday, they looked through/read books that Mrs. Fitch pulled for them from the library on their topic and took more notes.

On Wednesday, we recorded the kids talking to the ipad telling us everything they have learned on their topic.

On Thursday and Friday, they used their notes and were able to listen to their videos from Wednesday to help them start writing their own fact book on their topic.

We will continue this on Monday.  Next Tuesday, they will work on memorizing their fact book. 
Next Wednesday, we will record them presenting what they learned in front of a green screen. The final products will be sent to you hopefully before spring break!  

Miss Nemechek, Mrs. Fitch (media specialist) and Mrs. Eastman (district technology specialist) have been helping me with this.  We have been amazed at how smooth it has been to incorporate all of this technology and higher level thinking into our kindergartens writing time! They are doing an amazing job and we are all so excited to share their final products with you soon!