Native Americans and "Garbage"

Good Morning,

This week we have a lot of learning taking place in our kindergarten classroom and we will be finishing some units before our Thanksgiving break.

In literacy, we will be concentrating on learning the letter-keyword sounds of “y” and “x”.  The keyword for “y” is yellow and the keyword for “x” is fox.  We have been incorporating movement, verbal cues, and visual pictures into our sound review with hopes this will target a variety of our bodily/kinesthetic, linguistic/verbal, and visual/spatial learners.  Sometimes we change the movements that represent these letter sounds, ask your student which body movement we represented each letter with.

While continuing on our literacy adventure, we will continue to tell stories across our fingers in Writer’s Workshop and learn that readers can read books by reading picture clues about the story in Reader’s Workshop.  

Telling stories across our fingers is a great way to organize stories.  Instead of telling the story, “My dog went outside.” (1 finger story) We are learning to make those stories a 3 finger story.  The story could change to, “ My dog went outside and played fetch with my brother until my brother fell into a mud puddle.”  (3 finger story)  We are learning to tell these 3 finger stories verbally first, then we will try to take our words and break them up into multiple page stories.     

 

Reading picture clues can help students be more confident, independent readers.  I will be using these prompts and reading interventions to scaffold student literacy skills.

1.  Look at the pictures.	Meaning is the ultimate goal in reading.  Readers predict about words based on clues provided from the pictures.
2.  Does it make senses?	Readers use pictures to determine if what they read makes sense.
3.  Get your mouth ready.	Picture clues alone do not provide enough detailed information.  Readers initially concentrate on beginning letter(s) of unknown words.
4.  Does it look right?	By looking through a word from left to right, readers check their predictions about the word.  They confirm or reject predictions based on the sound-letter relationships.
5.  Reread.	Children can reread to use knowledge of oral language and to check meaning.
6.  Does it sound right?	Readers use their knowledge of both spoken and literary language to check if what they read can also be spoken.
7.  Look for chunks.	Using onsets and rimes, readers make analogies to decode unfamiliar words.

In Math, we will learn a new game I learned from one of my kindergarten friends from another school.  The game is called, “Garbage” or “Trash” (I didn’t make up the name).  The rules are below:

1.  Pull all of the face cards from the deck, take them out of the game.  Deal 10 cards to each person, with 2 rows of 5, like a 10-frame. Set the deck in the middle.

2.  Have the person who's going first draw a card from the deck (or from the top most card on the discard pile). Say the card is a 9. The player would put the 9 in the ninth spot face up and pick up the card that was there before. Say this card is a 5--the player will put it in the fifth spot. However, if the card-in-hand is another 9, then the card-in-hand is placed in the discard pile, and play passes to the next person.

3.  If the card-in-hand cannot be placed because the spot has already been filled, the card-in-hand goes to the discard pile and ends your turn.  The object of the game is to get all of your cards in order from 1-10, in ten-frame order.

4.  The person who flips over all their cards first wins. If they like, they can yell "Trash!" or "Garbage!" to announce their victory.

Let me know if you like playing it at home.  There are other rules you can play with the face cards but I feel like this is a great introduction to the game and it supports all of our 10-frame work we have been working so hard at!

We will finish our exploration of the Plains Native Americans, Southwest Native Americans and the Pilgrims this week.  Students have been working very hard over the past couple of weeks making masks, totem poles, sculpting, making boxes, and completing a KWL chart for all of the regions of Native Americans we studied.  Students have been very motivated to learn about the variety of traditions, legends, and characteristics of the different tribes.  We will close this unit on Friday by learning about the Pilgrims and the holiday we now know as Thanksgiving.         

We will be meeting with our 3rd grade buddies again on Wednesday.  Last time we met, we created portraits of our partners, next time you are in our classroom look around the room to see them!

Our upcoming field trip will be to the Flynn Theater.  We will be seeing, “The Teacher From the Black Lagoon.”  I need one more parent volunteer for this trip.  We are limited to the amount of seats provided for our class and adults.  As the date approaches, I will fill you in with further details.

Thank you very much for everything you do!

-Jenn     

 

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