Mrs. Powers' Kindergators

On my way into Tech tonight, I saw some students stop, thank and shake hands with another young man in military uniform. It made me think about our Veteran’s Day unit this week and how small kindnesses can often be a big deal. Here are some of the big things our small kids worked on this week in class. Reading: We worked hard to understand the terms “main idea” and “details” as we learned about the Bald Eagle, Veteran’s Day and the branches of the military. We also began thinking about how an author adds details to support their point. We wrote letters to soldier moms this week and will work on soldier dads next. Math: We wrapped up our unit on comparing numbers using strategy and we will be comparing and contrasting strategies that work best for the situation next week. We now have 17 out of our 18 students counting to 100 by 1s and our last one is very close so we will hopefully be celebrating 100% soon. We continued our introduction to word problems and introduced some of ...

We made it through Halloween week! And despite visions of candy corns dancing in the children’s heads, we managed to do lots of learning too! Here are some highlights: Reading: We continued working with word endings and added –ly and –ful to our list. We found lots of word endings in the stories we read this week. The kids loved the stories, “Creepy Carrots” and “I Need My Monster.” We began thinking about the points an author makes to support an idea in the text by choosing a monster from the story, deciding if the little boy wanted it or did not want it under his bed and listing the reasons why. It turns out your kids are pretty picky about which monsters they would allow under their beds too! Math: We continued with our unit on comparing numbers to see which one is more, less or if they are the same. The key to this unit is to be able to explain your thinking and show a strategy for how you decided which is bigger or smaller. We have been working on strategies called “budd...