This month we are starting my favorite science unit (and usually the kids too!) - Animals!! We will be exploring and researching all sorts of different animals, and will even have some live animals in our classroom!
This unit will go through March, and this week we have been kicking it off with exploring non fiction books and generating questions and things we are wondering as a class.
Here we are exploring the books for the second time and talking with friends about all that we wonder! We then added our questions to our inquiry chart.
I have been so thrilled with how many students are taking their learning home and wanting to research animals on their own as well! I encourage you to foster that interest and would love for them to bring in any facts that they find!
Non-fiction books are wonderful for us to learn about many text features such as labels, captions, etc.
What animals do we get to have in our classroom for real?
If all goes according to plan and the shipments arrive on time we will have worms, fish, and snails!
Not all at one time thankfully, but throughout our unit!
So what else are we learning?
Right now a big focus for us is writing sentences and being risk takers in our writing. Sometimes it is hard for kids to realize they CAN write and spell, especially now that they are reading! So we are practicing taking that risk and trying out complete sentences, giving details about our stories!
Working on our snowman writing! We usually write in our own journals, but this exercise was to get us being creative and providing detail! We had to create a snowman and then describe it in a sentence. We are working on the difference between labels and sentences. For example, instead of writing "My snowman" we would write "My snowman is wearing a black hat."
In math (which I don't have pictures of right now!) we are working hard on addition as well as word problems! You will see a word problem journal come home for the month. Most problems they will have completed at school, but there will be a few left in there for you to try at home as well!
We are working also on sums of 10, tally marks, and counting by 5's.
In reading our focus is CVC words with short i (kid, lip, sit, pig, etc) as well as focusing on sight words - we have many of them we will learn this year!
While those are our general class goals, we also have individual goals we work on to challenge us and keep us making progress! Please feel free to email me or check in anytime if you want to know more about what your child is specifically working on.
Thanks for all you do at home! We are having a great start to 2016 and I am excited to take some more photos and share them with you as we continue our learning into the second half of kindergarten!
