Kindergarten students have been busy learning about coins over the past couple of weeks.  First we sorted the coins, and then we discussed how much the penny, nickel, dime, and quarter are worth.  To further our discussion, we participated in various activities; we played coin Bingo and a graphing coin game, we watched some educational clips about money, and we traded money using our own cash registers.  Morning messages included tricky questions about money that the children had fun answering when they entered the classroom each day.  If you go shopping with your children, make sure to ask them to pay attention to the prices.  For many, this lesson was just an introduction to money, but we now know how much each coin is worth.  We will look forward to revisiting this topic again in the Spring!

This week the children experienced all our incredible book fair had to offer! We were so excited to meet a few of the authors of some books at the fair and to hear about their journeys to becoming published writers. These writers inspired our young authors to write their own amazing pieces as we move into a new writing unit. We are gearing up for our December writing celebration by talking about how we can express our feelings through our writing.  The children began by reflecting on an experience or a memory that they remember fondly. We are looking forward to beginning this process and learning about another genre of writing!

This week Kindergarten students began talking about feelings to continue our What Makes Me, Me unit.  We read many texts, such as Glad Monster Sad Monster, The Way I Feel, and Today I Feel Silly.  The children then wrote about their feelings using our new sight words I, and, am and talked about the different emotions we all have and how we all express them differently.  We created our own monster faces as an extension to the Glad Monster Sad Monster book and then had a good time acting it out and creating our own monster stories during writing workshop.  We looked at some emojis just to have a little bit of fun and help generate a fun discussion about how we feel! This social emotional learning unit helps to make our classroom a safe and fun loving environment for everyone.