Starting Daily 5

This week we built upon the procedures we learned during the first weeks of school, and began to start our academic subjects.

During our morning circle time, we began singing the ABC Disco, Learning Letter Sounds, and the Vowel Samba. We also began discussing the calendar and seven days of the week. Each student began using his or her own morning work journal to fill in the dates on the calendar, and the numbers on our 100 chart showing how many days we have been in school (10 so far).

This week in math we graphed how each student gets home after school. After making the bus, schoolhouse, or car, the students each came up and glued his/her piece onto the graph. We hung the completed graph in the back of the classroom and discussed which group has the least students and most students. We also used the graph to count how many students were in each group, and to count how many students are in our entire class.

We also began our math problem solving journals. Each day the students are given a problem to model and solve in their journal. Two or three children a day will get the opportunity to wear the "Problem Solving Sombrero" and share their methods with the class. This week we drew a picture of our family and counted how many people were in the picture. Also, we learned different ways to represent the number one (word, numeral, tally, dot, picture).

In writing we reviewed the steps of making our Friendship Salad, numbering each of the steps. We talked about reading in kindergarten. We can read by using the pictures, reading the words, or retelling the events as we remember them. In the case of Friendship Salad, we read by using the pictures and retelling from our memory of making the salad last week.

We also began a brainstorm list of different topics we can write about during writing time. The finished poster will be displayed in our classroom starting next week for the students to refer to all year long.

We have been getting more confident in our routines in the lunchroom, and the boys and girls buying lunches have been doing a wonderful job carrying their trays and opening their food items independently or with the help of friends! Also, we are continuing to practice our hallway bathroom routine, where we have to remember to be quick, quiet, and pay attention so that our class can quickly return back to the classroom to learn!

The class has continued working on learning student names, and this week we performed name cheers with partners, and for the whole class. Students had to spell out their name, and then the whole class would call out the students' name at the end. This was really fun for the kids to act out, and it is helping us learn our friends' names quickly as well!

During our reading block, we began to learn the different components of our Daily 5 reading program. Students practiced reading to themselves, playing letter games, listening to reading, and working on writing. We began by only doing each activity for two minutes at a time before cleaning up, but by the end of the week we had built our stamina up to working on each activity for five minutes at a time. We will continue daily increasing our reading and writing stamina, until we are eventually working on each activity for 15 minutes at a time.

On Friday afternoon, our class was rewarded with 20 minutes of "Fun Friday" centers. This was everyone's chance to use some of the items they have been eyeing all year long, such as the housekeeping center, overhead projector, building blocks, and computers. We will continue "Fun Friday" every Friday as a reward for the students' hard work all week long. Students were also reminded that ending a day on orange or red could potentially cause them to miss out on "Fun Friday" activities for the week.

We have had a lot of students working extra hard to model Patriot behavior, and they have been earning stickers for ending the day on blue, and trips to the treasure box for ending the day on purple.

Next week we will be reading Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom, mixing and fixing the letters in our name, continuing Daily 5 activities, writing the letter M and the number 2, and learning about the flag.