Hello Winter

Hello winter you have arrived.  This week we have had some chilly breezes  along with some heavy rain making it officially winter here in Northern California.  We desperately need the rain and are very thankful that it only seems to rain in between our recesses. Hooray for small miracles.  Yesterday as I was picking up my students from lunch a little one looks up into the sky and asks me "Where is Mr. Sun going?" It was so cute, the sky was quickly filling with rain clouds.  By the time we had reached our classroom it had started to rain.

It has been a busy week with lots of learning and some mid year Dibels.  If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook you may have seen the pictures I have been sharing.  I am trying to use social media more this year to share what we do in our classroom.  Here are the pictures that I have shared.

My kids may not all be out of the red on Dibels, but many have made HUGE improvements from where they started and that is something to be very proud of.  I shared their scores with them, to show them how hard they had been working and how proud they should be.  Their smiles were priceless. Some jumped from scoring a 1 on FSF to a 54 or 3 on LNF to 55.  I think that is something to CHEER about.  When I had posted this picture I didn't realize that the booklet on top had such a high score. I'd like to say that all my scores are like this, but in reality that just isn't the case.

This however is what a true kindergarten classroom looks like. 

Everyone has made growth some much more than others, but that is how it always is.  All of my students come to school with a variety of kindergarten readiness skills.  All of my students also have a variety of home support.  Some have a lot of parental involvement, meaning their parents spend time reading to them, looking at their class work and talking about their homework with them.  My other students just aren't so fortunate.  Many at least have an older sibling who reads to them, but the parents are also relying on that sibling to help  their younger siblings with their homework and with the skills they need more practice with.  For those students who don't have the parental support or the sibling support they just need much more support at school.

Do I love the assessment not really, but do I learn from it- absolutely, I learned for example that student in the 3rd row, although is a fabulous reader and writer, has some gaps and really struggles with medial and ending sounds. A few other students surprised me and showed me that they knew more than I thought they did. I think what is most important is that I take the information from this assessment and do something with it.

Last Weeks Re-Cap

Last week we continued to use math centers from my Hello Winter Math and Literacy pack. We worked on the following skills, measurement, number bonds and addition facts

 

For our Literacy Centers we worked with Syllables.  We will revisit this again.  One word syllables are hard.  My little ones wanted to make hat into two syllables as in ha-at and scarf was scar-arf.  I guess it is a good thing that I made two sets of cards for this center.  

If you only want the math stations or just the literacy stations, I have separated the bundle into two sets.

We also worked on writing.  We have been learning about penguins.  Writing this week was a center so I could work with students in a small group. I asked each student to think about what they had learned about penguins.  Then each student took a turn telling me one fact they had learned in a complete sentence. Their fact became their writing.  For the words they needed help with spelling, they were able to use the words from our January writing center and our classroom word wall.  We have been working on segmenting words to help us write and many students are becoming quite successful with this now.

We also read the book, Snowmen at Night it is a favorite of mine. After reading the book, we made our own version of what we think snowmen do at night.

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I really like all the books in this series- I just ordered the Snowmen at play, I didn't have that one.

These are the snow globes we started the week before, but we finished them up last Monday.  The kids loved the marble painting..  I think we will do some more marble painting in February with hearts.

Both the Snowmen at Night and the Snow Globe Craft project are Available in my TpT store

As you can see last week was BUSY and this next week will only be 4 days, but it too will be busy.  I didn't even share everything with you.  There just wasn't time to take photos and well who wants to spend an hour reading a blog post.

Hopefully you are like me and are having a 3-day weekend. Enjoy it- I'm planning to stay indoors and avoid the rain.