A Peek At Our Week!

Can you believe we celebrated our 20th day of school on Thursday?? The days are flying by in room 4 and I'm doing my best to slow down time and savor every minute with these kiddos. 

This week we read Pete the Cat and worked on retelling a familiar story. One of the kindergarten Common Core standards states that kindergarten students, with prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details. After reading Pete the Cat, the students worked on retelling the story to a friend, and as a whole class. After we completed our "retelling ticket," we got to make our very own Pete the Cat snack!

If your child has a favorite story to read at home, have them practice retelling the story in their own words after you read it!

In case you haven't read the story before, our dear friend Pete the Cat goes for a walk in his brand new white shoes. Along the way, he steps in strawberries, blueberries, mud, and even a bucket of water. Each time his shoes get ruined by something new, he keeps walking along and singing his song. The moral at the end of the story is, "No matter what you step in, just keep walking along and singing your song - because it's alllll good..." I think we all could learn a thing or two from Mr. Pete! :) To celebrate our fabulous retelling skills, we created our own Pete the Cat snack. We used a plain rice cake for Pete's shoe, then covered it in all of the things he stepped in - strawberries, blueberries, mud (chocolate pudding) and water (cool whip). We loved making and eating our snacks together with our room 4 friends!

Here's a great reading of our favorite blue cat's walking adventure!

On Thursday, we celebrated our 20th day of school. We will continue to count the days of school all year as a way to help the students develop a basic understanding of place value. Every ten days we make a "bundle," or a group of ten straws, and then they get to "move over to the house next door" - the tens place! On Thursday we made our second bundle and Zero the Hero brought us a special math challenge - sorting and graphing Froot Loops! We loved completing our challenge and then eating our special zero-shaped snack!

Mrs. Masino helped us learn all about the number 20 this week!

We wrote the number, filled in two ten frames with stickers, made 20 tally marks, and practiced writing our numbers to 20! The kindergarten end of the year Common Core expectation is that students will write numbers from 0 to 20. Teen numbers can be tricky and extra practice writing and recognizing numbers to 20 is always helpful!

We also added the number 20 into our math journals. Each 10th day we will add a Zero the Hero memory to help us remember what we were learning about at that time - this week, we turned our zero into Pete the Cat to commemorate learning about our furry blue friend!

We continue to add poems and songs into our Reader's Notebooks. These notebooks live in our book boxes and we will get to bring them home a few times this year to show you all of our hard work! Poems and songs are a phenomenal way for beginning readers to gain confidence in their reading, learn to recognize sight words, and develop their concepts about print (understanding that we read text left to write, top to bottom, and that words are separated by spaces). This week we learned a new poem called I Am Me, and we learned a new song to help us remember how to spell the word green!

This week the students got to meet this crazy lady (who looks and sounds a lot like Mrs. Bowe) - Scientist Bowe! Scientist Bowe taught us a little bit about the Scientific Method. We learned that scientists: 
1. Ask a question
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Test their hypothesis
4. Record their observations
5. Come to a conclusion

Our very first experiment to help us practice the steps of the scientific method was Rainbow Milk! We recorded the materials we needed for the experiment, and then put our hypothesis to the test. We love science! 

These two smiling faces are our Reed School PE teachers - and they are FABULOUS! This week we got to use the giant parachute, learn some soccer basics, and work on teamwork using our fling nets and volleyballs! We have PE every Monday and Friday - please help your child to remember to wear their PE shoes on these days!

At Community Time, the students receive special Kimochis Challenges that they can do at school, and outside of school. This month the students were given two challenges to help make Reed School the happiest and safest place to be. Ask your child if they have introduced themselves to anyone new, or tried using their friendly signals on the yard!

To wrap up our fantastic week, here are a few photos just for fun. These kids bring me so much joy and I hope they all enjoy a much deserved extra day of rest tomorrow. This week we get to have an extra art class with Mrs. Caldwell, a visit to the Reed STEAM Lab, and a walking field trip to the Tiburon Library! See ya on Tuesday Room 4! - Mrs. Bowe