Winter Snowmen

I sent home the January snowman project today and I hope they made it home safely. It was quite windy at the end of the day and I worried they were going to blow away! Just like the turkeys and the collages, this is a chance to do some fun artwork and be creative. The snowmen were originally going to be due on the 14th, but I decided not to send them home on Friday because I thought the combination of the big paper and the literacy bags would just be too much to carry. I changed the date to the 18th (Tuesdsay) so that you will have the weekend to get supplies and spend some time working on it.

Please remember that Literacy Bags need to be returned on Monday. I know that weekends go by very quickly and it seems like such a short time to have the bags at home, but I do need them back so I can get them organized to send home again on Friday. When you receive the bag, please check to make sure all of the items are included and make a note of anything that is missing. I want to keep good track of the items so that we can continuing using these bags for the rest of the year (and next year too!). I hope you are enjoying them and I would love your feedback about how they are working out from your perspectives.

This week we are focusing on the letter f and the sight word play. We have been going back to review some of the trickier sounds and working hard so that every student knows all of the sounds we have been practicing. DIBELS is coming up next week which means the students will be assessed on three tasks

Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF)
Students will be asked to sound out words like kik, fup, or pid. The words are made up words so that students will not automatically recognize them as they would simple words like cat or dog. This is so that we can accurately gauge their ability to sound out unfamiliar words. Students are asked to sound out as many nonsense words as they can in a one minute period of time and winter benchmark is 13 correct words.

Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF)
In the classroom, we refer to this strategy as "break is down." The students will hear a word and they will have to say all of the sounds they hear in the word. For example, if the teacher says "had," the student needs to say /h/ /a/ /d/. The winter benchmark for PSF is 18 correct words.

Letter Naming Fluency (LNF). Students will be asked to identify as many letters as they can in 1 minute. The letters will not be in alphabetical order and will be both lower case and upper case. The winter benchmark for this skill is correctly naming at least 27 letters.

We have been working hard since the beginning of the year in all of these areas. The DIBELS assessments helps give us good information about each student's growth and what their strengths and weaknesses are so that we can adjust how we help them. If you have any questions or would like to know what you can do to help with these skills at home, please let me know!