Weekly Update April 18-22

This week will be a busy week with a few special events and visitors tucked in.  On Wednesday, April 20th we will celebrate Earth Day a bit early by cleaning up the neighborhood around our school.  Our kindergarten classes will be in charge of cleaning up the school grounds.  We plan to head out from 10:30-11:00.  If you would like to join us, just let us know!  We will also be welcoming some teachers visiting from Wausaukee to observe our reader's workshop in action on Wednesday and our staff developer from Columbia University in New York will be here Thursday and Friday!  

Upcoming Dates:
April 18: No School for students
April 20: Community Clean up for Earth Day (a few days early) 
April 21-22: Columbia Staff Developer
April 29: Mrs. Hixon returns
April 29 and May 3: PALs Testing

Reading: This week many of the skills we will work on in reading are helpful in building a lifelong love for reading.  We will making "reading playdates,"  which are the equivalent of a kindergarten book club.  Students will make plans in small groups how to engage with their books by acting them out, playing school, or a variety of other games like hunting for sightwords and guessing feelings.  We will learn that avid readers are always imagining what is happening in their books like a movie playing in their mind.  

Writing: This week we are launching our True Stories Unit. We will remember how important the cover of a book is. It tells a reader what is inside and how a writer can use covers to help them hang on to ideas about true story writing. We will  focus on using time words to help tell parts of the story in order. We will also be using a picture walk to get an idea of how a story will go.

Math:  This week in Math the kindergartners will relate 10-partner drawings to addition equations and find changes in the partners of ten. Students will be making a 10-partner showcase and a teen number book that will illustrate teen numbers showing ten ones and extra ones. They will also be practicing identifying the number before and after on the number parade.

Centers:

· 10 Partner Showcase 

· Teen Number Book 

· Telling a story problem to go with a given equation

· Addition Crossout Game

Science:  Last week students came up with 3 hypotheses about why some balls move and bounce more than others: the size of the ball, the material the ball is made of, and what is in the center of the ball.   This week we will begin testing those hypotheses by examining a variety of balls and their attributes and testing for similarities and differences between them, especially by weighing, rolling, and bouncing them.

Word Work:  New sight words for the next two weeks: were, now, saw, our, made.  Practice writing sight words with chalk, wood chips, in the sand box, or anything else OUTSIDE this week!