Book Recommendations

Looking for something to read?  Here are the two best child-related books I've read recently.

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
This book covers topics such as Praise, Race, Sleep and many others relevant to our lives as parents.  NurtureShock is completely research-based, but very readable.


How Kids Succeed:  The Power of Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character
This is the book we (the Chapman staff) based our Character Education work on this year.  It, too, is very readable research.  It conveys the value of character education and the impact it can have on learning.

Happy Reading!

Mathematical Practices and Character Strengths

There are eight mathematical practices we work on throughout the year.  You will see them on the report card.  They are:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
4. Model with mathematics
5. Use appropriate tools strategically
6. Attend to precision
7. Look for and make use of structure
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning

They are K-12 ideas and are challenging for kindergartners.  Because of this, we try to embed at least one math practice within every math lesson.  The one we've talked a lot about lately is the third: "Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others."  In kindergarten, the language we use is, "I can use my thinking and consider the mathematical thinking of others."

Where does character come into all of this?  Well, the character strengths we've focused on so far include: Self Control, Courtesy, Optimism and Perseverance.  These, too, are challenging lessons to learn, so we embed them throughout our day.  

In pushing the thinking of your child during math conversations, I do my best to marry the two components - math practices and character strengths.  The math conversations we have definitely stretch your child's thinking.  We do a lot of learning from one another, which requires some students to explain their thinking and everyone else to be listening to the thinking of others.  The listening component is difficult for students this age.  It requires a great deal of self-control and courtesy.  It also takes perseverance to slog through a conversation about a tricky concept or pattern, which we do daily during our number corner (calendar) time.  (It also takes optimism on the teacher's part to believe that they can really do it!)  One character strength not covered, but equally as important, is courage.  It takes a courageous person to be able to share their thinking - right or wrong - with the group.  Luckily we have many courageous kindergartners!

We talk about nearly all of the character strengths throughout the school day.  Feel free to reinforce them at home so we have some common language between home and school.  Please also feel free to talk to your child about his/her participation during our math conversations.  Some conversation topics might include:

• Do you ever raise your hand during math conversations?  Are you able to share your thinking with the class?  How do you feel about sharing your thinking with the class?  

• What kind of listener are you when someone else is speaking?

• What is one thing you've learned from listening to someone else's thinking?

• Have you ever been able to explain something to others that helped them learn?

• Is it ok to share your thinking with class even if it might not be correct?

Thanks for your partnership in this difficult task of educating your child! 

What the heck do you do all day?

You might be wondering what we've been working on lately in kindergarten.  I know some of you hear a lot about our days, but many of you hear that we do "nothing" all day.  Here are a few things we've been working on lately...

In morning circle, we:

• practice reading and finding word wall words
• re-read for fluency, look for spacing, punctuation, and more
• started number of the day (to look at numbers in different ways and gain number sense)
• started fix-it sentences to start recognizing mistakes and practicing correcting them

In math, we:

• measure using length, using phrases like longer than, shorter than
• practice counting strategies (counting by ones, grouping twos, tens, etc)
• continue to familiarize ourselves with a ten-frame to help us gain number sense
• work towards being able to explain our thinking and also be able to listen and respond to the thinking of others

In writing, we:

• practice writing both our first and last names using appropriate capitalization
• leave spaces between our words
• experiment with punctuation at the end of our sentences
• spell word wall words correctly
• use our senses to make writing more interesting (I feel, I see, I smell, etc)

Of course, there are many other things scattered into our days.  I just thought I'd give you a snapshot of some of the things we're working on these days.  

Cheers!