Peek Of The Week

CREW: One thing we are really focusing on in kindergarten is integrity.  We are teaching them to have integrity and ALWAYS do the right thing even if no one is watching.  Our goal is to be kind and respectful human beings who can work hard and persevere to solve problems. We are working on Social-emotional learning (SEL) helps students develop the skills they need to thrive in school and in life. Through SEL, your students can build their competence and confidence to take on learning challenges, make good decisions, manage strong emotions, and get along with others. Currently, we are in Unit 3. Please see the Second Step HOME LINK handout that went home in folders to read about specifics and get ideas to continue their learning at home. 

Module: During Unit 2 of this module, your student will be researching how living things depend on trees to meet their needs. By the end of the module, students will be able to participate in a discussion around the module guiding question: “What patterns can we observe in living things?” 

What will your student be learning?

Students will begin to research how people and animals depend on trees with a focus on learning about how trees provide food and shelter for other living things. The learning will be focused on these ideas:

·      Researchers make observations and gather evidence to explain patterns.

·      People and animals get food and shelter from trees.

·      Trees help other living things meet their needs.

How will your student be learning?

Throughout the unit, your student will read, think, listen, talk, write, and ask questions about how people and animals depend on trees to meet their needs. Students will participate in these activities, among others, to build their literacy skills:

·      Analyzing nonfiction text for how people and animals depend on trees

·      Practicing fluency and comprehension through songs and riddles about how living things depend on trees

·      Engaging in conversations with classmates

·      Recording observations, writing and drawing about how people and animals depend on trees


What can you do to support your student’s learning at home?

Here are a few activities that you can do at home with your student to support his or her learning:

·      Ask your student to talk with you about these questions: What do trees provide for other living things? How do we depend on trees? What animals in our community depend on trees? What does a researcher do?

·      Read books and sing songs about what trees provide for other living things from home or at the library.

·      Identify different objects and food that come from trees around your home, and ask your student to explain how they help us meet our needs.

 Skills: We have been continuing to work on rhyming words, segmenting and blending words for reading and writing. We have also been spending a great deal of time on writing and meeting our writing goals. They have been brainstorming ideas, coming up with a sentence, writing each word, checking for punctuation, and using the best handwriting.  

Math: In this unit, students compose and decompose numbers to 10 in different ways. We call this “making” and “breaking apart” numbers.


In this section, students compose and decompose numbers to 9. At first, students only work with numbers up to 5 to build fluency with addition and subtraction within 5 as they compose and decompose numbers in different ways. 

Students understand that there are different ways to compose and decompose a given number. They work with physical objects, such as counters and connecting cubes, that they can use to compose and decompose numbers.

6 is 3 and 3.

6 is 4 and 2.

6 is 5 and 1.

Section B: More Types of Story Problems


In this section, students represent and solve story problems. Students compose and decompose numbers as they solve story problems where both addends are unknown. For example,

Jada made 6 paletas with her brother.
They made two flavors, lime and coconut.
How many of the paletas were lime?
Then how many of the paletas were coconut?

These problems may be more challenging to make sense of because there is no action in the story and they have more than one solution. By the end of the section, students find multiple solutions to problems. Students use math tools and drawings to represent and solve story problems. It is important that students can explain how their representation shows the story. Some students may be interested in finding all the solutions to a problem and they should be encouraged to do so, though this is not an expectation for kindergarten.

Section C: Make and Break Apart 10


The number 10 is foundational to the place value work students will do in later grades. In this section, students are introduced to a 10-frame by putting together two 5-frames which allows them to build on previous understandings of the numbers 6–9 in relation to 5. 

Students use the 10-frame, as well as their fingers, to make and break apart 10 in different ways. These tools are helpful because the blank squares in the 10-frame and the fingers that are down allow students to see or count how many more are needed to make 10. Students use these tools to figure out the number to add to any number from 1 to 9 to make 10. 

Try it at home!

Near the end of the unit, ask your student to draw a picture that goes with this story:

At the market, you get 10 apples from a bin.
Some of the apples are green and some of the apples are red.
How many of the apples are green?
Then, how many of the apples are red?

Questions that may be helpful as they work:


SEL: All classes have completed Unit 1- Thinking Thoughts and Feeling Feelings

Take Away Points for Unit 1 are:

Vocabulary: brain, thought, feeling, thinking, heart


We are starting Unit 2- The Group Plan- this week and will cycle through all of the classes over the next 3 weeks.

Take Away Points for Unit 2- The Group Plan:

Labs: We are working on creating weather stations to be meteorologists.