Campus International Kindergarten: Happy New Year!

It was great to be back at school after the snowy Winter Vacation. Our Explorers had many stories to share and were actually very eager to get right back to work. Typically, after the start of the new year, there is an explosion of skills with a kindergarten child and that was evident for certain this week. Students were making all kinds of connections, reading more books than ever and were verbalizing their thinking in amazing ways. Needless to say, it was a super week!

Reading:

We can imagine you are enjoying listening to your child read every day. Whether it is a book from their shelf, a magazine, a sign that they see or a letter that they received, they are reading! We continue to address the importance of knowing their sight words, sounding out words (words with blends and silent e can be tricky, but we are working on them) and using clues from the story to help us uncover some of the more challenging words. Taking picture walks prior to reading also helps get our minds ready for the story or information. We love to generate questions about what we wonder might be in the book and check to see if our wonders were correct or answered as we read. Readers are THINKERS and are engaged every step of the way.

Playing a reading game in small groups

We love to read!

Reading, Reading, Reading!

Using the Word Wizard app to work on sight words!

Math:
As we continue our understanding of numbers, we are spending a lot of our time decomposing numbers. That sounds pretty challenging right? It means that numbers can be broken up in a variety of ways. Understanding this concept is necessary to truly grasp addition and subtraction in its more traditional sense.

Here we broke the number 10 up in three different parts:

Here is our Shake and Spill Game using the number seven. It is fun to see all the combinations we can create that will make the number 7 using two sided counters (red/white).

Working on numbers 10-20 using place value. (1 group of ten and how many ones left over create the number). One Explorer's eyes lit up and said, "Oh this is magic!"

The Marble Math app is a favorite. Here a child is sequencing ordinal numbers from first to last.

Writing:

We are always writing! We know good writers work hard to express their thoughts in a clear way that others can read. We are working conveying our many thoughts and writing conventions as well (capitalization, punctuation and finger spacing).

Here a student chose to journal the colors in Mandarin!

WIth all our snowy weather over vacation, it has been fun to use our imagination and write about what it would be like if we lived in a snow globe. Oh the creativity!

Our Unit of Inquiry:

We have been working on How We Express Ourselves and we look closely at how celebrations are a way we can express our ideas and beliefs. We have spent our time looking at various winter holidays and discovering what they are all about (who celebrates them, what they mean, why they are celebrated, when they occur). Through our inquiry we are found many ways the holidays are similar as well. Gaining this understanding helps our Explorers have an appreciation and understanding of others with an open-mind.

Each class has been creating a mind-map as a way to document understanding in the classroom. This of course cannot go home to be shared, but we thought you might like to see what one looks like if it has been brought up at home.

As we learn about each holiday that students are asked to reflect back on the information and record their knowledge on a post-it note for classroom display.

Here are a few of our other activities too: