Reading & Writing
This week we are focusing on the letter D and our sight word is "are." Today we did an Art Literacy project on dragons, which was really great timing because dragon is a D word. Today is also Chinese New Year and it is the year of the dragon! We learned that in the Chinese culture it is considered good luck to be born in the year of the dragon and many Chinese families plan to have babies during the year of the dragon. The kids were excited to realize that my baby will be born in the year of the dragon!
At this point, we have gone through the whole alphabet and learned sounds for each letter. We have also been working on the "tricky sounds" which are /ch/, /sh/, /ng/, /ck/, and /th/. We finished up our third unit of Fast Track Phonics and last week I assessed both classes to see how they are doing with remembering the sounds. Most kiddos know pretty much all the sounds which is great! I am continuing to check back with kiddos to see how they are doing with the "say it fast" and "break it down" skills as well because these are essential pre-skills for reading and writing. It is amazing how those skills come together all of a sudden for some kids. I will continue to introduce more sounds which I call the "first grade sounds" such as the long vowel a_e combinations and other long vowel combinations, but since these are more difficult and part of the first grade Fast Track curriculum, I only introduce about 1 new sound a week instead of several.
As we move in 2012 we are beginning to focus more on using the letter sound combinations we have learned so far to write. Last week we started a few new activities that we will continue doing in the upcoming months. One is called I Spy Writing. I have a few I Spy books and I projected a page onto the whiteboard. The kids got to take turns telling the class what objects they spied and then we sounded out the words and wrote them down. I also had the children draw a quick picture of each word to help you know what word they intended to write. At this stage, I am looking for kids to write down the sounds they hear in words. That means often letters are missing and words are not spelled the conventional way. That's okay! When you help your child with his/her homework or help them write something, encourage them to sound out the word and write down the sounds they hear. It is much more beneficial for kids at this age to work on sounds words out than for them to be told how to spell a word correctly.
We also started working with partner practice books which provide children the opportunity to work with a partner and take turns being the teacher and the student. This is a different way of practicing letters sounds and reading words that gives each child their own turn to go through each letter and word and read them. Typically our practice is in a whole group format, but this way, kids are more accountable for knowing the words and sounds on their own. We have practiced how to offer help to a partner who is not sure and how to give encouragement and compliments for a partner's hard work.
Finally we did a word building activity where each child gets an envelope and some letter cards. I tell them a word to make and they use the letter cards to build the word. With each consecutive word they have to change letters or rearrange letters in order to make the new word. At the end there is a secret word that uses all of the letters they have. They did great with this activity!
Soon enough each child will get his/her own journal to practice writing sentences and telling about their lives and what they do outside of school.
Math
In Math we are continuing to practice our numbers that contain 5 groups and we are beginning to move on to teen numbers. I showed the kids a video last week with a catchy little song about teen numbers to help them remember that all teen numbers start with a 1.C'mon everybody let's get this done...numbers in the teens they start with a 1...
Sound familiar?
Here is the video in case you'd like to watch it too or watch it with your child.
If you have a child in the AM class, you might have heard that I was out this morning and Ms. Solheim was subbing. I was actually at school, but only in the classroom with the kiddos for about 15 minutes. The Kindergarten team has been participating in a training series called CARE which focuses on culturally responsive instruction. Today, we had the opportunity to watch each other teach along with Ms. Woods and the CARE facilitator. We met this morning to talk about our mini lessons, then I taught the class for about 15 minutes, then we traveled on to the other Kinder classrooms and met for the rest of the morning to talk about our activities and how they went. The kids did a fabulous job with the activities that I wanted all of those observers to watch. I was really proud of how much knowledge and mastery they showed. Our observation schedule came together late last week, so I didn't know I would be out until after I sent home the monthly calendar. I will be out all day on Thursday as well because we have another training with the larger group of CARE teachers from all of the schools in the district. The work we are doing as part of the training is really important to me and overlaps a lot with the work I will be doing for my dissertation in the coming year. Becoming a mommy and doing a dissertation...am I crazy!?
As we get closer to February, I am starting to plan for our Teddy Bear project. Each child will sew his/her own Teddy Bear and this requires a lot of parent helpers! If you are interested in helping please let me know a good day of the week for you and I will add you to the helper calendar. You do not need any sewing experience to help with this project! I usually have 1-2 parents each day of the week for 6 weeks (Feb-mid March) and parents work with 1 or 2 students at a time.
