Week 2: Monday

Monday, May 16, 2011: 11:50-2:45

Because of the stormy weather, week 2 in Mrs. James' kindergarden class started out with some inside recess at New London K. There was some dress up, grocery shopping, and coloring as the students waited for the day to start. Class began at noon with a milk run. Each Monday a number of students walk all the way up to the multi-purpose room (gym/cafeteria/theater/ect.) to get their milk for the week. This trip dovetailed nicely with snack. During snack, the kids took turns having their picture taken in a pop up theater for the upcoming play. After kids were finished eating, we sat down on friendship landing for some talk about family. We started by listening to Mrs. James read the Tommie dePaula book, Baby Sister. We then talked about how every family has something they all like to do, are good at, or makes them all look alike and each student shared what makes their family special. This was parleyed into a conversation about word families, specifically the -at family. We talked about how all the words that ended in -at belonged in the same house, and that they all rhymed. From here, we broke into stations. At one station, the kids continued to work with word families, this time with -ar. I was in charge of a station using colored blocks to recreate a structure or pattern on a card. They ranged from simple line patterns to standing structures with hidden blocks. Some students were able to jump to the hardest patterns and shapes quick, others required a little more time and found it beneficial to start with doing the flat patterns right on top of the card before moving on to more challenging cards. At the end of the day, one students grandfather joined us to read some books out loud.

Today, Mrs. James also gave me a lesson on symmetry that I will read through and develop over the next couple of days. I have the challenge of figuring out how I would like to teach the lesson keeping in mind different learning rates and styles.