Junior Great Books!

Thank you all for coming to parent teacher conferences this week. I enjoyed meeting you all and sharing how much your child is learning!  

This week our reading and writing lessons came from a wonderful program called Junior Great Books. This program is an inquiry model in which students are able to build skills in discussion, questioning, listening, and writing. The program uses poetry, short stories and folklore to develop deep thinking. This week's theme was "companions".  I've attatched the three poems we read this week in case you're interested in reading or discussing them with your child. Our writing focus was integrated this week as we wrote about something we like to do with someone, what our shadows like to do, and where Pooh and Christopher Robin might go together. 

As we continue to collect, count and analyze data with the question of the day in math, we also started new math zones. A favorite is "Compare", which is a counting game with cards. The higher number each round wins and gets to collect the other player's cards. You can play at home with a deck of regular playing cards!!

This was our last week of the health unit. We focused on brushing teeth, going to the dentist and what to expect at a doctor visit.

In our Media Center lesson this week we continued our study of the difference between fiction and non-fiction as we prepare for a mini research project on bears. We read a story about a bear who got lost and was scared and we drew connections we made to the story. In Computer Lab we tried out some cool new math games. I started a Symbaloo, which is a compilation of favorite websites. This will continue to grow as we visit more sites together. Here's the link: http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/kindergarten576 

Our Mystery Reader this week was Andres' grandmother!! Both she and her husband are retired from the education field and it was so nice to have them visit the class and read to the students. We have a lot of Mystery Readers signed up for November and December. If you have family visiting from out of town and they would like to read to the class, just let me know!