Diving DEEP into math!

We are SO lucky to have Math Buddies for Math Game Mondays!  We have a few fifth graders come in each Monday to play math games with the kinders.  This year we are using math and logic games, to dive deeper into math, and develop a good number sense and logic!  (They don't know that... they just think it's fun 😉)

During our regular whole group math time we have "number talks"!  Or sometimes, number JUMPS.  We spend a few minutes just exploring patterns and numbers.  The kids have already come up with some GREAT observations. Here they are having fun learning how to count by 2's, or skip count.  The kids have such great questions in our discussions, and we try and figure them out together... like how many would each friend have if you shared 50 with ten friends?  Today they figured out how to count by tens starting at 2, just by catching on to the pattern on our hundreds chart.  They are making some great discoveries!

In reading and science we are continuing to learn about our 5 senses.  We made rubber band guitars this week on our toolboxes.  We also tried to read the braille on the signs around the school!  

We also began talking about how to stay healthy as an intro to our unit on our amazing bodies.  We "sneezed" on each other with a squirt bottle, and then used a tissue to block the germs.  Then we made "sneezy pictures" of ourselves holding a tissue!

We put Glo-Germ lotion on our hands to see how our handwashing was coming along.  Some of us had quite a bit of work to do!  The kids were amazed at how hard it was to get your hands really clean!

This was a big week for Popcorn words (sight words).  Each student got their own popcorn word folder that contains their own flashcards.  We practice them with Popcorn buddies during reading time, or at snack time.  On Fridays they'll pass off the ones they can "pop" quickly, and get new ones.  This way each student can progress at their own pace in learning sight words.  They are so proud when they get to move a word from the Bubblegum side (slow, sounding out...) to the Popcorn side!  We had a popcorn party to kick off the popcorn words!

We had fun reading through our journals.  We've written so much already this year!  The kids are progressing through just tracing, to being able to write on their own, to being able to sound out words and "kid spell" them phonetically.  The kids were able to see their progress already as they read through their journals.  These will be keepers for sure!!!

Thanks to some parent volunteers we were able to run free time game centers on Friday!  The kids played War, UNO, Sequence, and Candyland.  Eventually I hope to be able to make these independent centers, but for now they are still learning most of the games, and definitely still need referees!  But they all had fun playing games.  Thanks Michele and Cody for coming in!