Writing About Reading

Over the last few weeks, we've been doing a lot of practice with reading and writing our snap words and using lots of different strategies for sounding out words we don't already know. This week, we practiced using the strategy of using the words in our books to help us write!

Each of the giraffes wrote about a favorite part in one of their stories, and they used their snap words, the words in their stories, and their sounding out skills to write about the part that they liked best! 

We've also been doing a lot of practice with writing our lowercase letters and moving our writing from labeling to full sentences. The giraffes have grown so much already as readers and writers!

Thanksgiving Learning Celebration

It has been quite the Turkey Trot in the Giraffe Class over the last few weeks as we learned about Thanksgiving and prepared for our Learning Celebration! 

One of the many Turkey Projects we made were our Pattern Block Turkeys. We have been learning about the names of different shapes and how they fit together, and we created feathers for our turkeys using different pattern block designs! We used triangles, squares, rhombuses, diamonds, trapezoids, and hexagons to make our designs!

We spent a lot of time learning a poem called "We Are Grateful" and made feathers to represent all the different things we are thankful for- our food, our homes, our sun, and our loved ones! We performed our poem along with some of our calendar songs for our families at our celebration.

We also got to put our fine motor skills to the test with our Model Magic Gobblers! 

We've also been learning about patterns in math and about plants. While the bulbs we planted last month are still quite a long way from sprouting, we've been able to take a look at the falling leaves outside to see how they grow. We noticed lines on the leaves, which are called veins, and these act like a water bottle for leaves bringing them the water they need from the trunk or stem of their tree/plant! We combined what we knew about patterns and leaves to create our leaf projects out in our hallway!

We had a lot of fun making our Thankful Turkeys, because it meant getting paint on our hands! After creating some colorful feathers for our turkeys, we each decorated a turkey body and thought of one thing we were thankful for to add to it. 

On Tuesday morning before our celebration, Mrs. Mitchell left a special message for us on the board :) 

we spent the morning creating our Turkey Headbands and practicing reading our writing and our books. 

Here are a few examples of the descriptive writing we've been working on! 

That afternoon, it was finally time for our friends, families, and teachers to come together to share and celebrate all the hard work we've been doing in kindergarten this year! We showed them our literacy bins, our art projects, and some of the math games we've played as part of our math menu!

These turkeys "gobbled" so many new things to their friends and families about what they've been learning in the giraffe class this year. We had so much fun celebrating all of their amazing accomplishments, and we have so much to be grateful for as a class. Thank you to all of our families who help to support our learning and growth at home, and a special thanks to those family members who traveled through the snow to be with us today!