Kinderwriters!

Our first FaceTime session with Miss Cabral's class was a success last week! The cupcakes are very excited to meet with her class again today.

This week, the cupcakes learned about how to retrieve information from various sources. We have been using a lot of nonfiction books and videos lately, and I wanted to show them a new type of source, so this week I found an "article" about Polar Bears. Boy is it hard to find kindergarten friendly articles, but I did, and it was very successful! Thanks to Smart Charts from The Teacher's Notebook! The cupcakes learned about the importance of active reading and pulling out important information. I told them that this is a skill they will need for high school, college, and even careers. I even showed them the highlighting and active reading I do for work. They know that even though I am done with school,  I still have homework so that I can become an even better teacher.

We read the article together and the cupcakes helped me decide what we needed to highlight.  We only needed to highlight the most important information. The information that would help us write our fact stories. On the left you see Mrs. Dapcic's research and on the right you see the students' research.

Next, we transferred the information we highlighted to our graphic organizers.

Templates courtesy of paytonspreciouskindergarteners.blogspot.com

Finally, we wrote our research papers! Now we get to present our learning to Miss Cabral's class after lunch!

Templates courtesy of paytonspreciouskindergarteners.blogspot.com

Fun Friday!

Brrrrrrrrr! Today's cold day was perfect for some penguin math. We have been learning about penguins all week and I decided to have some penguin fun with math! The cupcakes used Goldfish Crackers to build an addition sentence. We had to use "math talk" and write a number sentence to match our fish. When we finished we got to snack on the left over crackers! Yum!

Kinderwriter time!

Oh boy! The time is finally here! Miss Cabral (from Watergrass Elementary and one of my best friends) and I are ready to have our students meet through the computer. Our first Kinderwriter meeting will be tomorrow. Well, as long as technology cooperates! My cupcakes have been working on writing factual pieces about penguins. We researched penguins as a class then we got our brains going by filling out a graphic organizer. I found a great graphic organizer and cover page from KinderAlphabet.com! We talked about citing evidence from text and how to organize our writing so that it makes sense to the reader. The goal this week was to write a "3 Star Sentence".  The cupcakes had a rubric to guide them made with a little teamwork from Miss Cabral and I. The other goal was to end the report with a concluding sentence. Next week, the cupcakes will have to cite actual evidence of their findings and information in their writing. This week they were able to verbally share how they found their information. My cupcakes are getting college and career ready! Check out a sample below. All of the Kinderwriters did a SPECTACULAR job this week. I was so impressed and proud of them. I think Winter Break helped all of us come back refreshed and ready to tackle more complex goals! :)

We make our own snow...

It was great getting all of my cupcakes back this week after two weeks off! We started a unit about snow and snowmen. Of course, living in Florida we don't have any snow to play with, but I had an idea to help us visualize snow. GLITTER! We read books about building snowmen so my cupcakes could build some background knowledge about snow, then they wrote about building snowmen using sequencing words. After their writing was complete, the cupcakes illustrated a "snowy" picture and added some snowy pizazz with white glitter.

Then........

Hehe but it was ok, he knows Mrs. Dapcic's love for glitter and told us to carry on with our creations!

Here is a sample...