November Updates!

Hey families!  It's been a little quiet over here on the Kinder Crew blog due to parent teacher conferences and lots of other busy kinder things, but we're still here!  You may notice that I do my best to get a blog post out every week to keep you up to date on all our learning, but occasionally I need an extra week to catch up.  I'd rather wait an extra week and get a bunch of fun pictures up, rather than put up a blog post without pictures more frequently.  I hope that's okay!  

On the subject of parent teacher conferences, thank you to each family who made the commitment to meet with me and discuss how your amazing kinder is growing this year and ways we can continue to support him or her.  It was really great to meet with all of you and share our goals for your child as the year continues.  :)

In other news, here's what we've been up to!

Listening to Second Grade Narratives - We were invited to Mrs. Hickey's second grade classroom as her students had just finished writing narratives and wanted to share them with us.  This was perfect since our kinders are currently working on writing our own narratives.  It was also a great opportunity to make some new friends!

Writer's Workshop Updates - During our own writer's workshop, kinders have been working on:

• using speech bubbles to add dialogue to our narratives
• including WHO was in our narrative and WHERE it takes place
• adding details to pictures
• continuing to stretch words to write sounds we know
• writing passwords we know to write sentences

1. Reader's Workshop Focus - We love that we get to meet with Mrs. Young, one of our reading teachers, about once a week to focus on comprehension strategies that kinders can use on their own.  Mrs. Young helps us remember:

• how to retell a story
• to focus on WHO was in a story and WHERE it takes place
• how to use our fingers to retell a story or book
• that there are 3 ways to read a book
• we can retell both fiction and nonfiction books
• looking for picture clues with our Eagle Eye

We loved buddy reading with Mrs. Leite's class next door to practice retelling WHO was in the book and WHERE it took place.

Pumpkin Science - If you came in for conferences, you may have seen a few of our pictures from our pumpkin science, but here are the rest!  Kinders investigated:

• the parts of a pumpkin - skin, flesh, pulp, seeds, and stem
• how tall our pumpkin was with unifix cubes
• how many lines our pumpkin was
• the size of the pumpkin
• whether the pumpkin sunk or floated

MANY THANKS to the families who generously donated pumpkins and supplies for this fun learning experience!

Ask your kinder:

• What is a speech bubble?
• Retell the WHO and the WHERE in a story you read at home
• What is a fancy word that writers use for stories?
• What happened during our egg experiment when we put an egg in vinegar for 3 days?
• What was your favorite thing about pumpkin science?
• How do you cook a turkey?

Reminders:

• No School - Wednesday, November 22nd-Friday, November 24th
• PJ Day - Friday, November 17th
• Snow Gear - The playground expectations are as follows during times of snow:
• Kinders wearing sneakers can play on the pavement.
• Kinders wearing boots can play on the playground structures.
• Kinders wearing hats, mittens, jackets, snowpants, and boots can play in the snow in the field.
• If your child wants to leave a set of snowgear at school or set of sneakers at school while they wear boots back and forth to home, we have space on our coat hooks!