Kindergarten {Our Second Six Weeks}

Kindergarten ReCap (Our Second Six Weeks)

October 29 – December 14, 2012

We took a week off for the Thanksgiving Holiday. This blog post covers the activities we did during our time off.

Read aloud to the girls: Thanksgiving on Thursday and a Christmas book each day of December.

Completed the second Sing Spell Read and Write kindergarten book “On Track” completing the kindergarten program which included six multi page readers and a variety of reading comprehension evaluations. As well as five “my little story books” each based on a short vowel sound. She’s reading with confidence and her penmanship has improved.

Completed lessons 46 through 57 of “The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading.” The focus was primarily on two-consonant blends adding the letter “s” to words, sight word “of”, and hyphens. Also introduced consonant digraphs. Marin, often reads our bed time stories and is hungry to learn to read.

We completed Lessons 15 through 24 in “First Language Lessons.” Marin memorized the poem “Work” by M.A. Stodart. We covered proper Nouns and Places (common nouns) such as city, state. Performed exercises in story and picture narration.

Completed Lessons 16 through 27 of the Math.U.See Primer book. We lack only three lessons to complete the Primer book. Marin worked on addition plus one and memorization of addition with doubles (1+1 through 5+5). She learned to skip count by 2s, 5s and 10s. Added to the tens and hundreds place. Solved for the unknown. Learned to convert tally marks to numbers and write numbers using tally marks. Introduced addition to 10 and telling time. We supplemented these new concepts with fun dot to dot and skip counting activities.

Finished the Homes and Houses section of “The Usborne book of Living Long Ago.” While reading from this section of the book we built a four poster bed and a model teepee. We were given a paper castle to play with for a week to reiterate the areas of a castle and Marin was able to identify what types of people lived in the structures we read about.

Chose a new Science book for this six weeks. “Usborne Starting Point Science” Volume 1. We covered the first three sections: What makes rain? What makes a flower grown? And Where does electricity come from. The format of this book is similar to the History book and was more specific to Marin’s interests in the world around her.

In her Calendar note book Marin made daily notations on a calendar and learned to write the date with numbers. We are still drilling month/number association. She kept track of the number of days of school numerically and with tally marks. Everyday she practiced writing the Month and charted the weather. She practiced dialing her home phone number and wrote and addressed letters to friends four days a week. We also did a short unit on Veterans day.

We also introduced piano lessons at a very relaxed pace using “Music for Little Mozarts.” We covered the first few lessons introducing terms such a Piano and Forte. As well as covering up and down the piano. Marin learned to play We Three Kings after practicing numbering her fingers.