we keep growing!

Our Morning Choice/Morning Message

Our morning choice is a soft start to each day. The children peacefully transition in and are then provided with a little choice; a letter book to add to their collection, some counting practice, or reading books from their basket. 

The morning message provides a space to practice our beginning sound power together. We often generate lists of things that begin with the same sound. This week the Kindergarteners thought of words that begin with the /p/ sound, building one of our most powerful word lists. 

The excitement about p words continued when Kiki whispered to me with a giggle, "Tell my friends this later, but poop starts with p, too." And then Sullivan excitedly shared his picture of pepperoni pizza and Cullen drew four penguins in his letter book!

We have sight word power!

A sight word is a repeating word in a book, a word you then see in many books. Before we read these words quickly and smoothly, we study them; clapping how many syllables, getting our mouths ready for beginning sounds, and noticing what is the same. Our sound power is our strongest power and we can use it with sight words, too. 

On Thursday we talked about how the word we repeats in one of our community books about Kindergarten. We have worked with the word we a lot! We starts with the /w/ sound and then you can hear e sounding like it's name. We rhymed we with me, be, he, she. All of these words end like we, but have a different beginning sound. 

We can also study words with a partner. We had reading playdates and practiced our partner power and sight word power together.

We learned that readers organize their reading using a reading mat. Readers make a stack of books, organizing their books from least challenging to most challenging. This helps them to warm up their reading as they get ready to read their most challenging book. After you read your stack, you read it back- rereading!

Teaching Books

The writers have been planning and writing teaching books. This week they chose one book to publish. When we publish in Kindergarten we use special black pens and re-write our writing, making our work as powerful as we can. We add color to our illustrations and design a front cover; preparing our writing for an audience. 

As part of the publishing process the children shared their writing with a partner. Using partner power and our teaching book check list, the children checked that their partner's writing was ready to be published!