We continued our new unit on growing as small moment writers. The students learned about how to think, plan, and rehearse small moment stories. Pre-writing and drafting are important parts of the writing process. In kindergarten, these are done orally. The students learned that they should first think of a story, picture it in their mind, then practice telling the story orally. They can tell the story on their hand by touching each finger as they say a part of their story. Then, they draft which page to write each part on by touching the pages of their booklets. In this unit, we’ll continue to work on “zooming in” on one small moment and stretching that small moment across several pages. This helps children learn about elaboration and adding detail in their writing.
Highlights from Readers’ Workshop:
As we begin this unit on informational texts, it’s important for students to learn some pre-reading strategies they can use. It’s not expected that students pick up a book and start reading it without activating their prior knowledge about the book’s topic. Instead, good readers get their minds ready to read informational books. They look at the pictures and preview the text before reading, think about what the book might be all about, and they think about what they already know about the topic. All of these things will help students “get their brains ready to read.” I also taught the students that they can be their own teacher when reading informational texts by learning from the photographs. All pictures, whether in an informational or fictional text, play an integral role in books and must not be ignored.
Highlights from Math Workshop:
The students explored number pairs in greater depth. They used manipulatives to decompose a number into several different number pairs, and created or wrote equations to match their work. As we continue work with number pairs, the students are beginning to notice some patterns. For example, some students have realized that, for a number X, they can always create a group of 0 and another group of X and write an equation 0+X=X. In addition, some children are noticing relationships between the numbers in number pairs. It's very powerful for students to explore, investigate, and discover such patterns- as opposed to me telling them about the patterns. Students are constructing their own knowledge and making sense of their work. You can check out pictures of their hard work under the "Inside the Classroom" tab.