October 9, 2015
Reading
We will continue with Special Student of the Day until everyone has had a turn.
The children are getting a lot of practice writing names, identifying letters,
generating matching beginning sounds, and clapping out the syllables! We are
working a lot on identifying the beginning sounds in words. We are also working
on counting the words in an oral sentence. I say a sentence and the children
count each word. This helps them identify the concept of a word and will help
them when they write! We work on our sight words every day and we are up to
three sight words: I like, the. We read another decodable book this week with all
three of their new sight words in it! We are doing Daily 5 every day now and the
children are able to sustain 20 minutes of independent reading! This is fabulous!
Now I will begin with guided reading groups and I will introduce the rest of the
Daily 5 which is listening to reading, and word work. We have been learning
about nouns this week. The children know that a noun is a person, place, or
thing. We have a noun video we watch which helps them remember!
Writing
We continue with storytelling this week. The children are getting so good at
telling a story to match the picture they illustrated! Today we talked about
grouping things together in a story so they go together. Organizing and
classifying ideas in a story is a major part of story and essay writing and are
essential to begin now. Since kindergarteners start as concrete learners, I placed
items in the center of a circle that the children formed. I asked them to come up
with relationships they could see in the items. At first they came up with things
that were the same color or size. Then they moved onto grouping the items as
toys, things you wear, things you use to create other things. We will move on to
pictures of items, and then to drawings they make, then to the very abstract
and we will organize ideas as they go together.
Math
We are continuing with counting and cardinality. We will spend a lot of time in
kindergarten on the counting sequence and ordinal numbers. Kindergarten is
the only grade in which counting and cardinality is a standard so they must
have a solid grasp on identifying numbers, knowing which number comes next,
identifying missing numbers, etc. before moving to first grade. We finished our
counting books and they came home to you this week. This can often be a
challenging task because kindergarteners often struggle with 1 to 1
correspondence which is counting one object and saying one number. Often
kindergarten students count too many items for 1 number, or they skip items, or
don’t know the counting sequence. We began to discuss skip counting this
week also. We add new activities to math workshop every week and the
children love participating! While they are working independently I take a small
group of children with me to work on math skills.
Social Studies/Science
This week our focus was on fire safety. We read many fire safety books,
practiced stop drop and roll, practiced get low and go, and the children were
visited by the Willow Grove Fire Department. They discussed smoke detectors,
how to call for help, and they got to tour the fire engine!
Handwriting
We are working a lot on proper placement of letters. The children understand
that lower case letters are smaller but get very confused with the lines. I help
them grasp this by explaining that all upper case letters take up all three lines:
top, middle, and bottom. I explained that some lower case letters are small guys
and they sit under the middle line. Some lower case letters are tall guys and start
at the top with the upper case letters and some lower case letters are line
busters and break through the bottom line. Their printing is improving so much
already!
Reminders/Announcements
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Please send in a change of clothes for your child in a gallon size zip
lock bag marked with his/her name for accidents or spills!
Yellow Code of Conduct Forms: Please sign and send back the
yellow code of conduct form that was given to you at meet the
teacher night or sent home to you if you missed meet the teacher
night. This must be returned as soon as possible! Thanks!
Conferences: I sent an email invitation to those of you with
internet/computer access to sign up for our Fall Conference. Those
of you without internet/computer access I sent home a paper
copy. Please sign up for a conference time as soon as possible.