The kids were so excited to reach the number 5 this week in math! They brought in some awesome artifacts that represented the number 5. Instead of just looking for the numeral 5 in our magazines this week, we looked for five of the same things on our page. Here are some of the examples!
Rather than moving onto the next number next week, we will now spend some time establishing the number five as a benchmark number to develop our number sense (or our intuition about numbers).
Mrs. Planden was in on Monday and Tuesday this week, and the students learned some special things about the letter A. It is a VOWEL, which means there are two sounds it can make: ahhh (short vowel sound) and ayyy (long vowel sound). In our journals we drew pictures of ants, astronauts, apples and alligators! The following day, we used our playdough to make things that begin with the letter A.
We put out a math center to practice our number formations. We weighed some fall items (like corn, pumpkins and gourds!) on our digital scale, then found the matching number tiles and practiced writing them down on paper! This was a fun activity that kept some of our friends busy most of center time! We will learn more about measurement later on in the year, but for now it was fun for the kids just to have exposure and exploration time to discover what a scale is used for and to have some opportunities for authentic number practice!
For one of our new centers, we got to explore sunflowers with magnifying glasses and also used tools that would help us to investigate all the parts of the sunflower — by destroying them! We loved seeing all of the many different layers inside sunflowers and also did some dramatic play with what we had extracted from the original stalks.
We're diligently working through the tasks assigned through the Early Years Evaluation and we're almost done! This week we focused on sequencing and retelling a story using pictures, and did a quick letter check-in to see how our understanding of letters and sounds is coming along. Please find the review sheet in your child's backpack to see how they are doing! Some of our kindergarten friends even tried labelling the pictures with beginning and ending letter sounds. Over the next few weeks, we will be learning to explore writing by recording the dominant sounds we hear in words. If you see your child making these attempts at home, please encourage it and do not tell them that their spelling is wrong. If they are able to record "house" as "HS," that is incredible at this time in the year!
"apple"
In addition to our weekly letter inquiry, we practice the skill of rhyming every single day. I encourage you to point out rhymes when you come across them in the stories you read together and see if your child can create some of their own. Even nonsense words can rhyme! For example: cat, zat, lat, dat, etc. Rhyming is one of the many important pre-reading skills we develop on our way to becoming readers.
Here are some pictures from our centre time fun this week. We particularly enjoyed dressing up the AAAnimals, painting AAAnimals, creating our very first AAAbstract art and making stories in our new Halloween Town!
A ladybug came to visit Halloween Town!
The outdoor temperature is soon going to be changing on us. With cold weather comes A LOT of extra outdoor gear! Please ensure ALL of your child's belongings (hat, mitts, scarves, etc) are labelled with your child's name. Encourage your child to dress themselves independently at home so they are able to do so at school as well. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Miss Roberts & Mrs. Planden
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