Tiger ResearchOver the past several days leading up to the tiger trot, we have been making ourselves tiger experts. How do you do become a tiger expert, you ask? Read a lot of tiger books, visit tiger internet sites and check out information from the PebbleGo animal database! We have a long way to go to become full-fledge tiger experts, but we are on our way. We started by sharing what we thought we already knew about tigers and then read/listened to several non-fiction books. We listed ideas that were new to us and then decided on which facts were important to share with the school community. We shared important knowledge by working together to write tiger facts. We created a giant display outside of the GRE library so that everyone who passes by might read our work and come to understand why we need to help tigers in the wild. Please be sure to check out our work below, or better yet, on your next visit to school look at it all up close! Everyone was so excited to make this important work public. It was hard, but we all loved working together to share our knowledge. 10th Annual Glacier Ridge Tiger Trot!Friday could not have been a more beautiful day to trot for the tigers! Thank you to everyone who sent in a donation. We have not heard how much was raised for tiger conservation, but will let you know as soon as we hear. Most importantly, the kids are beginning to think about this important topic and realize that they can do something to help. Even though they are the youngest kids at GRE, they were able to listen and learn about tigers, articulate important facts about tigers and with support, write about those facts. Hopefully, they talked with you at home about what they were learning and why tigers need our help. If you did not get a chance to send in a donation and would still like to do so, you may. Please mark your teacher's name on the envelope and AM or PM class. Thanks! ComparingWe worked on comparing this week. Using one of our math tools, snap cubes, we built a tower of 10. Accurate counting was a must to build our tower. Then we looked around our room to locate items that were longer, shorter, or the same size as our tower of 10. We communicated our findings to our classmates. Comparing sizes and amounts is an important math skill that will we work on.! Comparing NamesChrysanthemum is a long name, but Catalina Magdalina Hoopensteiner Wallendiner Hogan Logan Bogan is even longer! The kids enjoyed stories about both of these characters. We looked closely at our names this week. We built name sticks, again using snap cubes, to show the length of our name. We compared our name to our friends' names and recorded our findings on a paper. We shared what we learned about our name as it compared to others' name. A note about letter formation... OK, maybe it's a novel.The children work on quick and efficient letter formation of lower case letters everyday in kindergarten. Please reinforce what you see us working on at home (check your child's sign-in sheets to see our focus.)
Important concepts to remember: *almost all letters begin at the top *Magic 'c' helps to form the lower case letters of a, d, g, and q *most letters are formed without picking up your pencil (one fluid movement is our goal!) *we pair spoken words with our formation example for lower case 'a'- "magic 'c', up, down" Why do we focus on all of this? This type of formation (De'Nelian) is quicker, more efficient, and more legible. We want the formation to be done with little thought so that the writer can focus on the most important thing-- their message. This is ongoing work! Sometimes even beautiful handwriting is not efficient. Watch your child to see how they are forming the letters when they write at home. If they are inefficient, hop over to a blank piece of paper to practice and then go back to their written piece. We do a lot of letter formation practice during interactive writing. This is when we compose a message together on the large chart paper. All of the students are working on white boards. We are brave as we try to record the sounds we hear in the word we next want to add to the chart. After we work on recording the sounds, we often do some quick formation work. Our letter formation practice is imbedded in real writing. This is what you can do at home! When your child is adding a sign to a Lego or block creation, or making a grocery list, or writing a card, this is a good time to show them correct letter formation. Pick one or two things to work on. Remember the message is the most important thing. Happy writing!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Author
Archives
April 2016
Categories |