December 5th - 9th

 

It was another wonderful week in Kindergarten with lots of hard work and helping going on!

~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~

We continued to work on improving our predicting skills by looking for evidence in the texts and pictures of the stories we read this week.

Learning Intention:

- Children demonstrate understandings of messages communicated in texts.

- Text comprehension is supported by applying varied strategies.

I Can:

- Make predictions based on the information I hear and see in the text.

- Compare the actual outcome in the story to the prediction I made.

This week the Tuesday/Thursday class read the book Enemy Pie by Derek Munson. After looking at the cover and reading the title, we had a discussion about the word enemy and then the students made some great predictions about what the story might be about -

• "I think a boy gives his enemy that gross pie."
• "I think the pie is going to taste really yucky because there are worms in it!"
• "Maybe the boy doesn't like someone and he's going to give them the pie to be mean."

After reading the first few pages, the students began thinking more critically and started to also confirm or adjust their initial predictions based on the evidence they had just seen and heard in the story so far -

• "Maybe the pie is actually a good pie and he's just going to trick someone!"
• "I think the dad is actually trying to help him be nice to his enemy."

We stopped reading just as the boy arrived at his enemy's house.  Students were then asked to reflect on the clues and evidence from the beginning of the story to draw a picture of what they thought was going to happen next. We reviewed the importance of making sure that we included specific details in our pictures (characters, setting, emotions, etc.) to help show our thinking. Students did a really great job creating detailed pictures that helped communicate their predictions. After, we took some time to compare the predictions we had made to the actual outcome of the story. 

• "I thought they were going to stay enemies, but they are friends now."
• "My prediction was right! I just knew they were going to become friends!"
• "I thought the dad was helping him get back at the bad guy...but the dad's plan was to trick him into playing with him so they would be friends!"

 

~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Students in the Monday/Wednesday class read Snowmen At Night, by Caralyn Buehner, and shared their predictions about this story orally. After looking at the cover and reading the title, the students made some initial predictions -

• "I think it will be about building snowmen at nighttime."
• "Maybe it teaches us how to build a snowman in the dark?"
• "I think it is going to be about snowmen and what happens to them at night."

After a few pages, we all agreed that this was going to be a story about what kind of magical mischief snowmen get into at night! We had lots of fun reading the rhyming words together and predicting what kind of shenanigans were going to happen on each page. After reading, many students came up with several of their own theories on what exactly it is that snowmen do at night!

~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Classroom Snapshots