Summer Reading at KPL

Parents listen up! A representative came to Robinson today to inform us of their summer reading program. This program offers prizes for students who read and log in their minutes on their website. Check out the flyer going home this week for more information! Your students seem excited to be rigorous readers over the summer!!

Research with our buddies

To end our unit on animals, your students have been hard at work researching their chosen animal. Using a graphic organizer to organize our thinking, we are answering questions on what our animals  have, can do, and are. To explore more information using print sources, we asked our 3rd grade buddies to help us. Using their expertise, they helped us research more information on our animals using the library iPads under the WorldBook online for Kids app. With this information we have practiced reading our information and presenting it to the class using our learned public speaking skills we have learned this year. Can you believe we are only kindergarteners? What rigor! Thank you to Mrs. Harris's class for your help and patience! 

Field trip to Shaw's Nature Reserve

What fun we had on our first big kid field trip to Shaw's Nature a Reserve. After eating a picnic lunch in the pavilions, we headed out with our guide to discover all that nature has to offer. We collected instects in critter cases and observed them, we explored petals and leaves using sunlight and illusions, we saw birds, snakes, mud bugs, spiders...the lost could go on and on! What a fun day to connect our learning inside the classroom. 

Collecting data...

Our Eyes at Home homework is being put to use. After finding out how many eyes there are in our classroom, we had the assignment of finding and recording how many eyes are in our households. In class we used that data to record how many people and eyes are in each house. With this data we found a pattern/connection between the number of people and eye in a given group. Can you find the connection?

Raz-Kids hard at work!

During our daily 4 reading block we take 12 minutes to engage in reading leveled books and answering comprehension questions in this wonderful application! I know a lot of us have even been working in this app at home too! Keep up the good work :)

ACES day!

For 20 minutes the whole school engaged in 'All School Exercise Simultaneously' rouine. We danced to 6 great songs that your children have learned from the 5th graders and our gym teachers over the year. What dancers they are! We definitely worked up a sweat! 

Storyteller time in the library!

Checking our writing!

Nate is hard at work checking his writing with our checklist. We make sure to put spaces between our words, use punctuation appropriately, spell sight words correctly, use a capital letter to start our sentences, etc. This checklist is a great took for us to become fluent writers! 

Breaking apart numbers!

In our teen number unit, we are practicing breaking apart numbers 10-20 using number sentences that start with 10 and finding how many more to make that number. 

Learning about other Author Studies

We traveled downstairs to listen to Ms. Dale's class read their stories based on their author study of Lois Elhart. We learned that Eric Carle and Lois both use many of the same strategies within their writing and illustrations. We also shared our class made book based upon Eric Carle's techniques with all kindergarten classes. It is now proudly sitting in our library for future classes to learn from! 

Exploring 'How-To' Books

We are starting our new unit on 'how-to' books! We are so excited to jump into this type of writing. We started this unit by looking at various how-to books that Mrs. Meihaus, our librarian, pulled for us. We learned that cookbooks, science experiments, and drawing books are all how-to books! We have started our own books on what we know how to do in order to teach others. So far, we are all learning 'how to' do so many things! 

Taking Turns

During our last Second Steps lesson (on character education) blue group engaged in a reader's theater about taking turns. Each student 'took turns' reading a page from a book about what it looks like to take turns. This is a skill that we use everyday in kindergarten. Blue group did a great job reading and informing us about this important 'play skill.' 

Earth Day: Doing Our Part

To celebrate Earth Day this week your students picked up trash along the trails in order to help keep plants and animals who live in there safe. We also brainstormed a list of other ways that we can help take care of our Earth and put our ideas up in the hallways to get others involved in Earth Day celebrations as well. 

iPad learning

Your students have been using iPads all year during our Daily 4 reading groups. However, recently, we have been implementing them into our math workshop time. Here are a couple friends who are practicing their addition math facts with the app Math Bingo! 

Place Value

Our big focus this quarter in math has been place value. We have surrounded our activities around the idea of breaking apart numbers into tens and ones. The pictures below show one activity we engaged in that helps us organize our thinking about place value. Students grabbed a ziplock bag that has a number on it, counted the materials inside the bag, wrote the total number down, then broke it apart into groups of 10's and 1's and recorded down their answer. Phew.... What rigor! 

Outdoor Learning Day!

During our half day, we dedicated our morning to learning about our outdoor learning classroom! We engaged in nature rubbings, compost and recycling, trail collections, and even some outdoor dancing! We loved being outside in the sunshine and seeing what wonderful things the outdoors has to offer. We even got to eat our lunch outside.... What a treat! 

Service dog lesson at Aberdeen Heights

Ms. Heifner and Mrs. Jackson's first grade class were invited to Aberdeen Heights to learn about service dog training to celebrate their new dog park! We learned a lot about how dogs are able to care for people with special needs. We are looking forward to our visit back to Aberdeen to see the finished dog park!