Monday, Monday

Apologies in advance....I did not manage to take many photos today.  We were busy doing lots of interesting things, I just didn't remember to take any photos.  

Here's a little look at how our learning is evolving during calendar time.

This was our graphing question today.  We worked really hard to read the question together.  First we looked at the choices together and then we looked carefully at the words in the question.  We concentrated mostly on the first letter in each word and then made some guesses that made sense (as we thought about the choices for our graph).  Without too much work, we were able to read today's question accurately.  

The choices were: dog, bird, cat and fish (all words that we know the signs for, so we practiced those too!)  As the kids come up to get their little square, we try to figure out whose square is whose.  In a very short time, most of the kids can look at the initials and tell me the first and last name that the initials stand for.  Amazing.

Today, we really made an effort to make our choices based on our own opinions, and not just choosing something because our friends chose it.  One of the kids looked at our completed graph and determined that we did a good job of making our own choices today (cue angels singing!!!!)

After creating our graph and interpreting the information, I asked the question "how many people in our class would like to have a dog or a fish?"  Some kids were able to figure this out pretty quickly.  The majority of the kids knew that we had to put the numbers together, but weren't really sure how to go about doing that.  So we moved to our handy dandy ten frames.  The blue dots represent the people who would like a dog and the red, fish.  We put them on the ten frame and then came up with a number sentence, or an equation (yes, we use the word equation in Kindergarten) to find the answer.   We will continue to explore numbers this way, using a visual representation to help us see what this abstract equation really means.  If you child is expressing an interest in this (as I know several of the kids are!) please encourage them to explore and practice at home.

We spent some time in the sun this afternoon with the other Kindergarten classes.  It feels like years since we've been able to play outside in the afternoon.  The kids were so happy to have the playground to themselves and reconnect with each other.  Hopefully this is a sign of things to come....bring on Spring!