Our Big Book this week is Rosie’s Walk.  

We started our day by taking a picture walk through the book–I have never seen Kinder. kids so excited about a book.  They were very curious as to why some of the pages did not have words on them, so we had a nice little talk about that.  They were also surprised that there was no mention of the fox anywhere in the story.  The Kinder. kids hung on every word once we started reading the story!

Here is our Morning Message for the day.  

In January, the children will be writing it by themselves (I’ll be there to help!!).  We’ve moved our focus away from identifying letters (we all can do that and will return to it as needed) and on to letter sounds, studying words, sentences, punctuation, and finding sight words. 

We then had time for Writer’s Workshop where the children continue to do a great job at writing and using their knowledge of letters and sounds.  I’m holding off on teaching any new lessons at this point because they are all at a comfortable, successful level right now.  In January, I will pick back up with more structured lessons.  Now I am doing different mini-lessons with individual or small groups of children based upon needs.

We also started a new Predictable Chart titled, “I am thankful for…”.  I figured there would not be time next week to get it all in, so we’re doing this one this week.  We had a talk before we began the chart about what things we are truly thankful for and those things that are special (video games, extra toys, etc.).  We also talked about how some children do not have some of these things and they all became very thoughtful with their responses! 🙂

I kept the same poem from last week in our pocket chart station–I haven’t rotated everyone through it yet.  You can see it in this post: I Like Turkey Feathers

We also make Native Americans using math facts.  I differentiated this lesson by making three groups of children get the same answers in different ways.

One group matched numbers to numbers, another matched dots to numbers and a third completed simple addition facts to get their answers.  The answers all matched up to the same key, so in the end, they all looked the same:

After the children were done, we got out some of our Lakeshore Math Boxes and rotated around different stations:

Here are some various pictures from the children working on them:

Sorting

Patterning

Simple Addition

Measurement

Although I think these boxes are fabulous, I think that you could make them just as easily and have them change or fit in with your concepts/themes.

I’ll be out tomorrow but my kids will be echo reading Rosie’s Walk, completing a Thanksgiving themed graph, reading our Scholastic News “Food In The Forest” and the usual things!

I am attending a Science Workshop tomorrow–what themes do you do for science this time of year?  We’ve already done leaves, we might do turkeys, and will head towards animals in winter.  I have to bring a theme to keep working on tomorrow. I was thinking of beefing up my seasonal changes theme–any great ideas you can’t live without for this theme?

Kristen 🙂