Mrs. Garrabrant's Classroom: Treasure Blocks, Starting Workstations & More

We had another busy, and thank goodness a little cooler of a week here in Kindergarten! We created our beautiful covers for our exploration journals.

Now that we have discussed and practiced how to treat our classroom materials appropriately, we began our "I Wonder" workstations this week. During this time, the students get to choose where they will be working each day. The different areas provide the students with different areas to play and explore with many materials in many different ways. Below are pictures from our science area.

Engineering Area

Small Hands Area

Library Area

Art Area

Loose Parts Area

Look Closer Area

Home Living Area

Writing Area

The students have already mastered our Red color song and were able to bring home their red books to share with you. I hope they are reading their book to you and singing the song as well!

We have also learned about the letters F & E this week. We will be focusing on capital letters first and then we will go back and learn the matching lowercase letters. After watching videos on both letters and listening for words that began with each sound, we made a list of words that we could draw. Below is the list of our list for the letter E. For the letter E, we discussed the long and short sounds. Also below is our letter F alphabet card. The students did a great job illustrating, 5, 4, frog, flag, fan, french fries, flower, farm, and fence. I will post a picture of our finished product once I add labels to it.

The students also received an alphabet book for each letter to take home and practice as well, ask them to read them to you while pointing to the words!

We began sharing our treasure blocks this past week and learned about 4 friends. Every day we learn about a different friend by having them share their treasure block with the class. While they are sharing I create a web full of information about that person including their interests and favorite things. After we learn more about them, each student draws an illustration of that friend that shows something we learned about them. The students are able to practice fine motor skills, appropriate pencil grip, letter identification, syllables, how to write their friend's name and make it in sign language, and how to use our writing materials appropriately.

You can see my treasure block and web above. Below Raegan and Isaac are drawing illustrations of things they learned about me.

They learned that I love football so you can see the illustration below is me watching football. They also learned that I have two dogs and enjoy swimming so they incorporated those into their illustrations as well.

Kala sharing her treasure block.

Adele sharing her treasure block.

Lea sharing her treasure block.

After the students draw illustrations for our new friend, I put them into a book with a cover and they get to take it home. Don't worry if you don't see your child's illustration in the book, I keep it and put it in their portfolios so you will get them at the end of the year!

We also learned about literacy lab this week! In literacy lab, we will be working on practicing making our names, letter identification, letter sounds, and eventually learning how to read. Mrs. Ball is our literacy lab teacher and we will be going to her room beginning on Monday for literacy lab every Monday- Thursday for 30 minutes. In our first visit, Mrs. Ball discussed the rules and expectations in her classroom. She also read us the book, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" Afterwards we created our own pages to make a class book.

After Mrs. Ball put together our class book, she came to read it to the class in order to learn about the friends in our classroom. We get to keep the book and put it in our class library for the students to read whenever they work in that area.