Diving into Learning!

After 4 weeks of school and establishing our classroom community, we are starting to dive more into academics! I hope to start small group stations for reading and math and also invite parent volunteers to work with students next month.

This past week, I introduced independent reading. We are working on our stamina and that our responsibility during this time is to READ, READ, READ! I am charting down their minutes; currently we can read for 5 minutes. That's pretty darn good for 5-6 year olds to sit still doing one task! We've been reading wordless picture books and that readers can use pictures to help them tell the story. That's a key reading strategy. We've also been working on sight words: I, am, at. Each week, I'll be introducing a couple sight words. Since it's only September, I'm taking it slow and just doing one word a week. 

Our Poetry Journals are coming along nicely! Aside from Poetry, we will have journals for Writing and Science. 

In math, we talked about where we've seen numbers and that they are everywhere.

On our classroom carpet

On sports jerseys

House numbers

School buses

Street signs

In Social Studies, we reviewed classroom rules and talked about respect and responsibility.

We read David Gets in Trouble (I love the David books!) and talked about being peacemakers in the classroom. Peacemakers are people who make good choices and think through their actions. We made our own "David's" and signed our names. 

In honor of Constitution Day, we made our own Classroom Promise and signed our names. 

Other extra things that went on this week: We have third grade buddies! Each student has a buddy and we got to meet them for the first time on Monday. They did a get to know you activity and took photos with each other.

We are practicing writing our names properly. A good handful of students still write their names with a combination of upper and lowercase letters. I want to nix that habit!

We have Second Step with Mrs. Lawry every Tuesday. She is our school guidance counselor. Currently, she's been talking to the class on respectful listening and using self control. Some of you have been completing her HOME LINKS. Awesome! It is not mandatory, but the skills and concepts on the links are important. 

I introduced liquid glue to the class, and that we use just a dot--not a lot! Liquid glue can get pretty messy in kindergarten. But they did great with it!

Well that's all for this post! Hope you had a restful weekend.