Our First 6 Days of Kindergarten

We've had a blast the last 6 days in kindergarten!  These children are amazing and have gone beyond my expectations for the beginning of kindergarten.  We have been able to accomplish so much in 6 days. 

All About Our Names

 

We've done so much with our names this week!  We have looked closely at our names and our friends names, especially with recognizing and naming the first letter of our names, learning that our names begin with an uppercase letter and the rest of the letters in our names are lowercase letters.  We practiced building our names with magnetic letters and then we practiced building our friends names with the magnetic letters. 

We read the book Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes.  We learned that one of the characters, Chrysanthemum, has 13 letters in her name!  After the book, we created a graph to see how many letters we had in our names.  Then, the children shared what they noticed.  They noticed that there was no one in our class that had 2 or 3 letters in their names.  5 children had 7 letters in their name, which was the most.  Only 2 children have 8 letters in their name.  Once we analyzed our graph, the children recorded the data onto their own graph to share at home this weekend (in your child's Friday folder) with you.  We also created a class book around the number of letters in our names. 



Celebrating Diversity


This week we read the book It's Okay to be Different by Todd Parr to help celebrate our differences. Before the reading, two children stood in front of the class while the rest of the class discussed what was the same and what was different between our two friends. After the reading, we went back to the page that said It's okay to be proud of yourself. We shared moments that we felt proud about something we did. Then, we shared ways we were different than everyone else. The children were very respectful to one another when sharing their thoughts with the class. Once our discussion was complete, the children went to the tables to complete an It's Okay to be Me! self-portrait.

On the second day of this activity, we looked at a brown egg and a white egg.  We shared what was the same and what was different about the eggs.  We also shared what we thought was on the inside of the eggs.  Many of the children thought the eggs were going to be different inside because they looked different on the outside.  They were surprised, I think, when the eggs were cracked to find out that the insides of both eggs were exactly the same.  The moral of this activity was that no matter how different we are on the outside (both physically and what we are interested in), we are all the same on the inside and that we all want to be treated nicely by others. 

Number Corner

We began Number Corner, which is a component to our math program. The number corner lessons and routines revolve around the classroom calendar. There are four basic components: a calendar, which the markers always are in some sort of pattern, a chart that tracks the children's month in school, a birthday chart, and a link chart to which a link is added for every day the children come to school.

The pattern of markers for this month (September) features 4 shapes: triangle, square, circle, and rectangle, which are arranged in an ABCDABCD pattern. In Our Month in School chart, the children are posting new number cards each day they come to school. For example, it shows the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, to show we've been in school for 4 days.