Week of October 26, 2015

Letter of the Week:  

This week we will be working on the letter Zz

Star Word:
my
can

The star word and the letter person worksheet were sent home on Monday in your child's red folder.

 Skills  

In our Skills curriculum, students are being exposed to forming letters correctly. Each day we will learn a new letter sound. Students will: form the letter at the carpet, on a vertical surface and then in their skills book. With each letter, we will have fun activities dealing with the beginning sound.
 Some games are: riddles, I spy, Something That Sounds Like, Guess Who, Minimal Pairs, Finish my sentence...
We will continue blending words every day to gain mastery in this area.
Letters that we will be forming this week are:
o, c, g, i
Each day we practice blending & segmenting words. 

Words students should be able to read and write are: 
did, tag, tad, mad, dad, did, dim, it, at, cat, mat, dig, dog...

Centers

Writing & Reading

During Writing Workshop we will discuss how to sound out our words when we are spelling. We can't just sound out our word once, we have to keep sounding/ stretching it out until we can hear all of the sounds in our word. We practiced writing leaf, pumpkin, family, sister, brother...
*Students continued adding details to our pumpkin writing from Monday. 

During our reading center, students made a Halloween Counting book and illustrated each page. We now have 5 books that we have made ourselves in our book box- along with a few other texts that we have from my book bins. Each day students were able to read their books. All students are being expected to hunt for star words wherever they go. They can find star words in bigger words, on boxes, around the school, in books, on signs... It is important that students can fluently read their star words and not have to sound them out. These words that we learn should become automatic, and we are practicing this in class each day. As for the words that have not been taught, we are learning how to sound out words in our Skills program. We then use authentic text from our book box to become experts at this.

As always, reading at home every night is encouraged.
Thank you!

Math  

This week students are working on adding 1 more to a number.
We are drawing 1 more with a group of objects and we are also drawing a group of objects that are 1 more than a given numeral.
We've been playing a lot of hand and dice games. The students are getting good at using their fingers to show 1 more. 

 Plants 

In our Listening and Speaking Domain we are finishing up our Plant domain.
 This week we will discuss how plants are useful to people and we will learn about George Washington Carver (botanist). In our centers, we quizzed students on their knowledge of plants with a "Climb the Stem" game. On Thursday we will play Jeopardy with students. Each table will pick one student to be the "Eggspert" and we will see which team knows more about plants. On Friday morning we will have a quick test on what we have learned about plants.

Vocabulary your child has been introduced to: 

roots, stem, leaves, flower/blossom, photosynthesis, pollen, nectar, pollination, life cycle, seed, seedling, mature, decay, nutrients, produce, fruit, Johnny Appleseed, hero, orchard, scrumptious, deciduous, bare, dormant, sheds, habitat, evergreen, cones, needles, conifers, bouquet, lumberjack, oxygen, provide, botanist, canvas and crops. 

We do not expect students to master all of this vocabulary, but it is important that they are exposed to this language. They will now have the prior knowledge that is necessary to gain mastery in future grade levels.

Jack's mom came in on Tuesday to read a book. After she read to the class, the kids had a delicious Halloween themed snack. 

On Friday we will have our annual Halloween Parade! 
If you want to help your child get dressed for the parade, come to the school at 1:40. You will need to wait in the lobby until parents are allowed in the classroom.

Parent-Teacher Conferences

Tuesday, November 3rd

A reminder will be sent home on Thursday with your scheduled meeting time. 

Please let us know if you are unable to make it and we can always reschedule. 

Hope everyone had a 

Happy Halloween!

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Week of October 19, 2015

Letter of the Week:  

This week we will be working on the letter Pp.

A letter was sent home on Monday asking for you to supply a pumpkin. 
Thank you so much for sending in a pumpkin. We had so much fun with our pumpkins this week and will continue to work with them on Monday next week. 
They will be sent back home on Wednesday!

* We carved a pumpkin on Wednesday and put LED lights inside to make it glow. We shut the blinds & the lights. Mrs. Clark came in and played the monster mash as we ate our snack. It was a spooky experience! All of the kids had a great time.

Star Word:
are

The star word and the letter person worksheet were sent home on Monday in your child's red folder.

The kindergarten teachers set up a pumpkin patch outside our window so that the students could go Pumpkin Picking for Star Words. They had a great time looking for star words and writing them on their clip board. When we got back to class we continued to practice writing our star words. We made them into "shooting stars" and each child had a chance to make the magnetic star fly onto the board. There were many chances to practice our words this week!

Since we have been practicing our star words and letters quite a bit in class, I will be sending home our latest letter name, letter sound, and star word assessment on Wednesday, October 28. Please practice any letters or words that are circled. 
Thank you!

 Skills  

In our Skills curriculum, students are being exposed to forming letters correctly. Each day we will learn a new letter sound. Students will: form the letter at the carpet, on a vertical surface and then in their skills book. With each letter, we will have fun activities dealing with the beginning sound.
 Some games are: riddles, I spy, Something That Sounds Like, Guess Who, Finish my sentence...
We will continue blending words every day to gain mastery in this area.
Letters that we will be forming this week are:
m, a, t, d
A chaining folder will also be introduced after letter 't'. Students will spell words using our chaining folder. This is a great resource which helps students to separate sounds that they hear in a word.
Words we will be spelling are: mat, at, mad, dad, tad, add...

Writing 

During Writing Workshop we'll continue using our ABC book. Shared writing will be used to help model forming letters close together when they are in a word. Star Words will be used to form sentences. During writing workshop we will write pumpkin stories. 
On Wednesday I modeled making a list (on the board) as we carved our pumpkin.
As students write, the expectations for each child may be very different. Some students will be focusing on adding details to their pictures to "show" more and label parts of their pictures. Teachers will help these students with their writing by writing what the student wants their sentence to say. Other students will be drawing a quick picture to get an idea of what they want to write and most of their writing workshop time will be spent segmenting words with teacher support. 

Reading 
Since we had a few new additions to our book box last week, we will add one more pumpkin book with an interactive vine. Then they will continue to gain mastery with all of their new books. Students who have mastered all of their new texts and are reading fluently with no teacher support will get a chance to blend words with authentic texts that are also in their book box. We have students in our class that are even taking it upon themselves to read the directions on our math worksheets- so cool!

As always, reading at home every night is highly encouraged.
Thank you!

Math  

Numbers 9 and 10 will be the focus for this week. With these numbers, students will continue to count objects in: a line, a circle, scattered formation, 5-group, and an array. 

As I mentioned last week, you will notice a lot of work with "5". We want the kids to start thinking about numbers as 5 and some more. For example, 10 is the same as 5 and 5 more. We draw a lot of 5-groups in class and the groups help students to see 5. We also use our fingers a lot because we have 5 fingers on one hand and we can add on more with our other hand.

 Plants 

In our Listening and Speaking Domain we continued to learn about plants. 
 This week we will look at pictures of blossoms that were pollinated by bees and the fruits they produced. 
On Monday we brought in several different types of fruits and we cut them open to show the seeds. Students discussed different ways pollination can occur (bees, many insects, wind)
We will also learn about Johnny Appleseed this week!
On Thursday and Friday students were reintroduced to the difference between deciduous and evergreen trees. A few weeks ago we told the kids quickly about these two types of trees and the difference between them, but this week we will have a lot of informal and formal conversations about their major differences and similarities. We will also go on a few nature walks to examine the trees.

Vocabulary your child has/will be introduced to: 

roots, stem, leaves, flower/blossom, photosynthesis, pollen, nectar, pollination, life cycle, seed, seedling, mature, decay, nutrients, produce, fruit, Johnny Appleseed, hero, orchard, scrumptious, deciduous, bare, dormant, sheds, habitat, evergreen, cones, needles and conifers.  

We do not expect students to master all of this vocabulary, but it is important that they are exposed to this language. They will now have the prior knowledge that is necessary to gain mastery in future grade levels.


On Friday we had an assembly on Stranger Safety.

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