Strawberries and Bananas

This week, Kindergarten writers met with their new, “Strawberries and Bananas” writing partners. These helpful partners can give each other support by listening and asking questions about each other’s writing. Forming writing partnerships gives students another tool in their tool belt to help prepare their writing for an audience. Kindergarten writers discussed ways to write stories that people will be eager to read. Ask your brave writer what they learned this week in Writer’s Workshop.

Pumpkin Survey

On Tuesday, Kindergarteners had a short field trip around the school. Kindergartener’s visited First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth grade classrooms to ask them the question, “Have you picked a Pumpkin?”. Each Kindergartner had a special role as we went to each class. Half of the Kindergarteners asked the question to the older kids, while the other kids took count and wrote down tally marks for each raised hand. We then came back and used the information we gather to create a bar graph. Ask your Kindergarten student what part of this mini-trip was their favorite part!

Vivid Vocabulary

Kindergarten scholars have been learning sophisticated words each week during their vocabulary study. These rigorous words come from our Text Talk curriculum. In this curriculum, we focus on one book each week.

The book is read aloud to the class on Monday and Tuesday with frequent pauses to scaffold comprehension. Students develop deep understanding through comprehension skills such as summarizing, identifying problem/solution, recognizing story structure, clarifying story ideas, making inferences, and building prior knowledge throughout each story. Wednesday and Thursday’s lessons each explicitly teach 3 new words with robust conversations about the words in child-friendly examples. Students extend their understanding by illustrating examples of our vocabulary words. They have quite a collection of illustrations in their vocabulary journals!

Kindergarteners are so excited to be learning these robust words. They delight in hearing these words outside of our vocabulary instruction and enjoy applying them to different situations throughout our day.

• Friday, October 12th- 11:30am dismissal
• Monday, October 15th- Make-Up Day
• Tuesday, October 16th- Parent Morning Meeting (8am)
• Thursday, October 18th– Boone Hall Field Trip
• Wednesday, October 31st-  Halloween Carnival, 11:30 dismissal