This week we began our IB Unit “Who We Are”. This unit looks into how our environment can influence our roles and responsibilities. We started this unit talking about how families are different. We read the story What Makes a Family and created a thinking map identifying the main idea and details of the story.
In the story we learned that families can be all different sizes and with different types of family members. We created an apple tree that illustrated the number of family members that live with us.
We also read another book called When I am Old With You about a boy talking about all the things he likes to do with his grandpa and wants to do with his grandpa as he continues to get older. We talked about how not all families like to do the same thing as other families. Students then drew pictures in their journals what they like to do with their family.
As we continued to learned about living and non-living things we spent this week learning all about spiders. We learned about the vocabulary word called schema. Students know that their schema is stuff that they’ve already know about and understand.
We started the unit creating an anchor chart and then writing about what we already know about spiders.
Then we read the non-fiction story Spiders from National Geographic and then finished our writing about what we learned and added to our schema.
The next day we watch sciences videos where scientists observed how spiders grow and change as well as how mother spiders take care of her eggs. Then we created spider lifecycles.
For emergent reading students partner read the story The Spider. As a class we discussed the story’s main idea and the details that supported that main idea. Students should have brought this book home to read.
To illustrate the spider facts that spiders have two body parts and 8 legs, we created a construction paper spider art. Students got to decorate their spider with any color bow that they wish. For our last writing activity students wrote about if they liked spiders or not.
This week we have been really focusing hard on writing and being able to segment sounds from words and put them into writing. One of our phonics activities from this last week was writing spooky CVC words.
This last week our theme was All About Me, where students learned about what makes them who they are. They learned about different body parts and how they look different and similar from others, discussed their favorite things, and learned about other classmates. It is an introductory unit to the bigger International Baccalaureate unit of Inquiry Who We Are.
We started of the unit by learning how to read to self and partner reading with the emergent reader book, All About Me. We read the book as a class first then students practiced reading by themselves and reading to partners. Finally we filled out a web map and discussed the main idea and details of the story.
Sorry everyone that there has been a lack of updates, my student teacher had been taking over the responsibilities for much of the winter / early spring.
This week we’ve had our unit on beach and ocean animals. We started off the week by reading an emergent reader book called At the Beach.  We labeled a web thinking map that identified the main idea and details of the story.
For writing students used the ideas from the web thinking map, as well ideas of their own, and wrote about what they would like to do at the beach.
For math students took various 2 dimensional shapes and created their own sandcastles. They then graphed the number of each shapes they used for their sandcastles.
The kindergarten all-star class got their first introduction to leveled readers using the Reading A-Z’s projectable books.  We read the story The Classroom and learn the sight word ‘the’.  Students learned how to use a picture to figure out unknown words.  We used the smart board and read the book on the projectable version.  We made a web thinking map outlining the main idea and details of the story.  Students then sorted pictures of different items into three groups; school items, transportation, and clothes.
 
We read the story called A Book of Hugs and labeled the main idea and details of the story.  For writing we wrote in our journals about what kind of hug do we think is the best.  We also made flip books about things that we love.  Finally, in preparation for our Valentines Day party, we decorated our Valentines envelopes.
 
 
 
 
Last week had our unit on cold weather animals or winter animals.  We read an interactive story called “Penguin, Penguin” and labeled main ideas and details on a thinking map.  Finally students made penguin glyphs based on their preferences about winter.
We also read nonfiction books about winter animals and got into partner groups and practiced reading easy reader books about winter animals. Â Finally we practiced following directions and made TLC art walrus.
This week we started fire safety week and we talked about how firefighters help keep us safe in case of a fire.  We read the book “Firefighters A-Z” and watched fire at Hooper’s store video from Sesame Street.  Afterwards we made a list of things that firefighters need to help keep us safe.  Then we wrote about one of the items.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Z6njK-LGs]
This last week we moved on in our fall unit, and started our mini unit on pumpkins. Â We started out reading nonfiction books about pumpkins, then we filled out a web thinking map about things we can do with pumpkins.
Then we read “The Biggest Pumpkin of All” and I brought in a pumpkin so that students could investigate the pumpkin.  They measured the pumpkin using connecting cubes, tested to see if the pumpkin floats, and explored the inside and outside of the pumpkin.
This past week we started our new unit about the sky and the difference between daytime and nigh time.  To begin our new unit we started learning about the sun and the importance the sun plays on our planet.  We read a nonfiction book called “The Sun: Our Nearest Star” and watched a presentation on BrainPop.  We also created a circle map, made our own illustrations, and wrote sentences.  1st grade worked on their own paper with a topic sentence and two details.
 
 
The next day we created our own class sun dial by putting a tall stick in the snow and marking where the shadow of the stick ends at various times throughout the day.
The Kindergarten All-Stars 