Flip Cams and Pancakes

As I delve deeper into the craft of teaching, I summoned all my moxie and ditched the Reading series teacher edition (for this week). It is important for me to mention that based on my data from assessments, my kiddos are meeting expectations in phonics and phonemic awareness, which does not mean I abandoned the reading foundation skills for my skillet.  Rest assured stakeholders, those skills were taught this week in conjunction with listening, speaking and writing standards during Reading block. We also read informational text in Social Studies (inside Reading block) on Benjamin Franklin and wrote about this famous American using details from our ladder graphic organizer. 

Armed with, literature from our Media Center (thanks, girls!) and lots of courage, I set out to build a lesson that would address many standards at once.  The children were able to retell the stories we read and compare and contrast adventures of story characters and events.  They also identified with the author and illustrator of a text when they created accordion books and sequenced events of the wordless text, Pancakes for Breakfast.  The lesson started gaining momentum and I got so excited I wanted to record our progress.  Unbeknownst to malomee, she comes up to me and shows me a flip cam she borrowed from our Media Center (gotta love those girls) to record her children reading. AHH!!  True to her giving nature, malomee suggested I use the flip cam in my lesson (malomee to the rescue!!).  My hope is the children will be able to access throughout their learning the skills taught embedded in the sticky sweetness of the syrup and pancakes.

With love,
Mrs. C.

Books?  Check.  Graphic organizer?  Check.  Griddle?  Check.  Children ready to learn? Check, check, check!

Pancakes, Pancakes movie

Edible Landforms

For the last two weeks, we have been studying landforms.  I saw on this website (thank you!) that inspired me to use edible landforms as an extension to our standard based learning (who says it has to be boring???).  After using a simple evaluation, the children consistently got pond correct, so I had them create their own pond after viewing this image:

We had so much fun yesterday, we kept going with graham cracker landforms today.  We used chocolate frosting for land, dyed blue frosting for the ocean, chocolate chips for rocks (coastline) dyed green coconut for grass and colored snocaps for mountains (thanks, proteacher!)

I am truly learning, laughing and loving Kindergarten.

Fondly,

Mrs. C.

Happy 100th Day!

Oh my goodness!  My first 100th day....I look at blogs and see the wonderful activities seasoned teachers do with their children and I am so inspired!  I have to be perfectly honest, I was grateful to survive it and have had my camera on hand.

I wish I could say I had the kids sort the mix or do something academic with this.  I had purely selfish reasons to mix mini marshmallows, cherrios, plain m & m's, and butterscotch chips.  I wanted to eat it!

This is what it looks like to try to do 100 jumping jacks.  Poor kids, they made it to 47 and said, "No more, Mrs. Caronna!"

The Living Museum

Malomee and I are so very excited about this project that is a brain child of a team mate of ours (shout out to Amy)!  In conjunction with our Social Studies standards, the children are learning how to use and create a timeline.  They are also listening to stories about people in the past who have shown character ideals such as honesty, courage and responsibility.  An extension of this learning is the Living Museum project where the learner gets to select a famous American and construct a timeline with their American’s birthdate and major accomplishments.  The children then get to present their posters dress as their famous American.  Malomee and I chose the following Americans:

So excited!  Cannot wait to see how the children will take to this project.  I will be sure to have my camera that day!


Fondly,
Mrs. C.

Mini-Writing Workshop

Hello Families,
I am going to attempt to clarify the process of our writing which I have just added to the activities you can do at home with your learner.  I am including all of the tools provided to me by my school.  The Flagler County Writing Assessment Rubric for Kindergarten is provided in your planner and is used to determine at what stage your child is writing.

     
Your children are emerging writers and it is so very exciting to see them marry what they are thinking on a topic to the letters and sounds they are learning.  The focus in building a critical writer is to provide them with how to construct focus, purpose and a plan to their essays.  That is a mouthful for us as adults to understand and thankfully there is a framework that will help.

The expository frame provided here is from a writing workshop all teachers attended and is currently what we use in class.  I will give a topic we will work on this week in the blog.  The children and I will work on this at school during our Writing block. If you can, help at home.  I will chunk the parts of the framework in to different days.  Constructing the topic sentence (two days), First (reason- two days), Next, (reason -two days), Last (reason- two days), In conclusion (two days).  In your sessions at home, please only take 8 to 15 minutes for each one-on-one meeting.  You can support the children in how to write by using sounds.  Ask your child to s-t-r-e-t-c-h out the word with the charts I sent home. If your house is like mine, I wish you luck in finding that little chart!             

This is a formula, but I am choosing to look at this process of writing from a warmer point of view.  I am tilling the land in showing the foundations of writing with focus, organization, support and conventions.  I will plant these seeds now.  With your help, you will slowly come to see and enjoy the beauty of  your capable writer blossom.
Warmly,
Mrs. C.

p.s. Please follow the blog!  Let me know you are out there, pretty please.

Happy New Year!

Hello Families,
I am sorry it has been so long!!  There are many updates to inform you of with our homework (again?!), available websites for enrichment activities and our schedule.  I will try to keep it brief.
Homework will not be checked or graded and is for the enrichment of skills taught during the week.
Spelling City can be used to practice high frequency words.  I will send home a letter this week on how you can access your learner's sight words (a.k.a high frequency words and heart words).
Here is a powerpoint you can use to practice sight words as well http://www.slideshare.net/mllc04/storytown-sight-words.
IXL is a math website to be used in addition to our math series.  You will also receive a letter with login and password information for your learner.
If you are completely bored and have nothing to do (ha, ha, ha), you can go to Mr. Maffesoli's Math Common Core Standards to see what your learner is expected to know before they leave Kindergarten.  Thanks to his hard work, you can even do activities that correlate to the standard.
The common core Writing standard I would like to focus on for homework is W.K.1 which says your learner will use a combination of drawing, dictating and writing to compose informative (we say expository) texts in which they name what they are writing about and supply some information about the topic.  The framework we use is a topic sentence, for example, "My favorite book is The Wizard of Oz for three reasons.  Then we use transitional phrases first, next, last and in conclusion to form our explanation.  I will send home a copy of the framework and the rubric used to assess your learner's progress.  I will also write in the planner the topic we are working on each week so that you can help them write at home.  Please be sure to let your learner sound out each word they attempt to write using the sound charts that went home.  If that is too difficult, they can draw what they are trying to express.
On a lighter note, we are trying to go to the computer lab, every other Tuesday.
Your children have grown so very much in such a short period of time, sometimes it astounds me.  I am so very grateful to be a part of their learning experience.  Thank you for your trust and patience.

If you have any questions at all, please contact me, we are in this together!

Fondly,
Mrs. C.

What's New?

Families,

If you are looking for enrichment activities in Mathematics, you can use the user name and passwords sent home in your child's Daily Folder (please write me a note in the planner if you need another letter with the information).    The activities assigned on the Envisions website will allow you to see a Visual Learning Animation which your child sees every day as we go through the math topics. A link is on our blog for your convenience if you'd like to access the site. Currently, we are in Topic 3, understanding numbers 0 to 5.

Letters with user names and passwords will be available by early next week for our Reading series on Think Central.  The link is also located to the right of your screen under "Helpful Websites".

I look forward to meeting with you soon to talk about your child's progress next week.  

Thank you for staying in close contact with me.  I will continue to strive to keep you abreast of our classroom life.

Warmly,
Mrs. C.