This week as we were building our background knowledge about water as a natural resource, we started talking about how water can become polluted. We learned a little bit about how oil spills impact ocean life. Then things got a little messy as I asked the kindergartners to try their hands at cleaning up an (vegetable) oil spill. Students were armed with spoons and tried to scoop out the oil. We found that even though we kept scooping and scooping, we were leaving a lot of oil in the water. We also found that it was really hard to get just oil out - we were getting lots of water in our spoons, too. After our exploration, we talked about how hard it is to clean up pollution in the ocean and what that means for ocean life.
Hooray for these kindergarten readers! After reading a book called Games, we created a web to show what the author wanted us to learn about games. We then did some shared writing to create a sentence that told the main idea of the book. I am so proud of the great thinking and writing of this group!!!
The snow is melting! And the sidewalks and gutters are gross. Today we explored all of the trash left behind when the snow melted away this week. All of the kindergarten students went outside to look and see what kinds of litter we saw in front of the school. Unfortunately, there was a lot! We used a graph to track what kinds of litter we found and talked about how litter impacts the plants and animals in our community. We also talked about how most of what we saw out on the sidewalks could have been recycled to keep our community clean!
Today we realized that sometimes we need to add more to a story to help our writing partners understand it! Students learned to go back to a piece of writing to add more and showed their changes by using a green pen (or marker) to tell more about their story. It was really amazing to see students make changes based on their conversations with their writing partners!
We got cool new stuff!!! Thanks to our latest donorschoose.org grant, we got a ton of exciting new engineering centers! Among many awesome materials we received were some great engineering centers that ask the students to solve problems from our favorite folk tales - rebuild a chair that Goldilocks broke, rebuild a bridge for the 3 Billy Goats Gruff, and build a house for the 3 little pigs that won't blow over. I think that the students' favorite center is the magnetic roller coaster where they build tracks to try to get a plastic cog to roll into a certain basket. My favorite part of this Donors Choose project is that this grant allowed us to get each student a STEM notebook where they draw plans for their solutions to each design challenge and record the results from testing those designs.
For the past several weeks, we have been checking our landfill to see what is decomposing - the apple and bread are starting to look pretty gross! As an extension of this activity, today we did a sort of materials that will decompose and materials that will not decompose. Students helped sort materials on the Smartboard and then recorded their thoughts in their notebooks. After sorting the materials, we took a closer look at materials that will not decompose and talked about alternatives to putting these items into a landfill. Students did not need any prompting to share that many of these items can be recycled. Bebel proudly shared that you can always reuse old toys and clothes by donating them to someone who needs them. Excellent thinking!
Today we learned to take advantage of the same kind of help that professional writers use -- a writing partner. Our STEM kindergartners paired up with a classmate to read some of their recent personal narratives. Before partners teamed up, we talked about all the ways that partners can help each other - complimenting, asking questions when we don't understand what is happening, or even helping to sound out words. It was really amazing to see students sharing their hard work and giving feedback to their classmates.
Personal Word Walls are a great tool for kindergarten writers! Sometimes kindergartners struggle with writing because sounding out each word is such hard work for young writers. Personal Word Walls allow kindergarten students to have frequently needed words right at their fingertips as they are writing. Using file folders, students glued on letters and then recorded words from our class word wall. Students then added words that were important for their own writing - like the names of family members, favorite sports, or favorite foods. These word walls will be tucked into our writing folders to allow us to become more fluent writers.
Today we used 3-letter word spinners to create CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. Students used various spinners to create words and decode them. Students then determined whether their words were "real words" or not and recorded them on a two-column chart on their dry erase boards. We loved using these new tools to read words!
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Mrs. McGrane
I love teaching kindergarten literacy at STEM! It is amazing to be a part of the reading and writing growth of a kindergarten student. You get to see kids move from knowing some letters and sounds to being enthusiastic readers and young authors. Archives
March 2016
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