Note: This year I am blogging weekly reflections at my school site (weskids.com) in order to provide more transparency in my teaching for parents, students, and the community (local and global). I will be cross-posting most of the entries here at Bit By Bit as well. You can see the original posts at the “Reflections by Mr. S” blog.

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It’s been a while since I’ve written about Kindergarten, so I’m dedicating this week’s reflection to let you know some of the great things happening with them in Computer.

To start, most classes have recently learned the “3 Before Me” rule. This class expectation has students trying to find at least 3 students to ask for help before they ask an adult. Usually, the student sitting right next to them knows the answer and so this helps teach students to “take control of their own learning.” Many students are already using this skill.

Last time I wrote about Kindergarten classes, we were spending time at the wonderful site, starfall.com. We returned to it for several weeks and will visit it again later in the year. Again, it’s an excellent resource for your student at home.

Hopefully you’ve all heard your scholar sing “The Primary Color” song (we have a really “silly” way to sing one of the parts of the song, and students love performing it). They learned this song during our Primary Color unit, which reinforced concepts that they were learning in Art. We used some great sites to figure out how to mix primary colors to make secondary colors (you can find these and other lessons on the weskids.com website).

Students worked on “Counting,” or more specifically, recognizing groups of numbers. I am absolutely stunned by the expertise this group of Kindergarten students showed with this skill compared to years past. It clearly shows that the changes we’ve made as a school in our Math curriculum have given Kindergarten students a stronger foundation for number sense.

Students worked on a lesson that required them to “Follow Directions.” They worked with a game where they had to listen to a sequence of things they needed to click on in a specific order to uncover a “bug.” The site is called “Buggy Trail” at “Tina’s World.”

Students are currently working on “Number Sequence” by putting numbers in correct order.

As always, we end each class with a book and have continued to enjoy more Mo Willems (http://amzn.to/1fxFOQG) along with the Olivia series by Ian Falconer (http://amzn.to/1dQ7qK5).

Things to do at home with your student:

• Go on weskids.com and ask him/her to show you the lessons that we’ve done.
• When using the Counting games, challenge your scholar to see if she/he can also put the numbers in order by doing it “backwards” (for example, with the Laundry Shirt game, I asked them to also put the LARGEST number on first—on the RIGHT SIDE of the clothing line—and work their way backwards.
• Ask them if they still remember what Primary Colors are combined to make Secondary Colors.

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