January 29th-February 1st

News & Reminders:

• We will be starting our Teddy Bear Project soon! Each student will get to sew his/her very own Teddy Bear. If you would like to send in special buttons to be the eyes on your child's bear, please do so by Wednesday February 6th.
• I already have a few parents who volunteer weekly, but I will need some additional help for the Teddy Bear project. If you are interested in helping please let me know! 
• We will have a Valentine's Day party on Thursday the 14th. I am sending info home about Valentine cards tomorrow in the Friday folders. 
• Report Cards are being sent home tomorrow.

Reading & Writing

Our letter of the week this week is R and our word of the week is for. 

This week we started a new unit on Animals which started with a story called Mama Cat and her Three Kittens. The vocabulary words for our story were compare and actions. We read the big book story that told about what the mama cat and her three kittens did, then we did a silent picture walk to remember all of the actions the cats did. After that, the kiddos talked with their partner to see how many actions they could remember from the story. Finally, they did some writing and completed the sentence "Cats can ____."

I introduced a new app this week called Skitch. We use this app to label pictures/photos in order to practice sounding out and spelling words. I will periodically email you examples of your child's work using this app so you can see the development in his/her spelling.

We have completed our Fast Track Phonics units, so we are now moving on to reinforce some word work skills. We are using various apps to practice spelling words and changing sounds to create new words.

Math
We are continuing to work with 5-groups, but this week we used pennies and 5-groups of pennies instead of the square inch tiles that we typically use. Today the class built the numbers 1-10 using 5-groups and extra pennies. Soon we will be moving on to teen numbers which helps to build the foundation for place value. All of the repetition in math is intended to build number sense and automaticity with basic math facts.

January 14th-18th

Reminders & Info: 

• There is no school on Monday due to MLK day. 
• I will be out next Wednesday because I am attending a workshop for our Digital Learning Collaborative grant.

Reading & Writing:
This week we are finishing up our third unit of Fast Track Phonics with the sounds /y/, /th/, and /x/. Next week I will be assessing students on recalling the sounds and writing the letters for the last 10 lessons we have done. We are continuing to practice sounding out simple words and writing them using the Sketchio app as a way to practice "break it down" which helps with figuring out how to write/spell words.

Our letter of the week is H this week and our sight word is you.

On Monday we read a big book story called Our Special Sweet Potato Pie. We talked about the vocabulary words special and feast. Students practiced retelling the important parts of the stories with their partner using picture clues. With our big book stories, we focus a lot on not just sitting quietly and listening to a story, but stopping to talk about what is happening, make predictions about what will happen next, and make connections between  the story we are reading and other stories we have read before. This type of shared reading is a great way for students to share their ideas and to do more thinking during story time. When I ask questions, I have students answer the questions with their partners because that way everyone gets a chance to talk and say what they think instead of just a few children who raise their hands.

Math:
This week we are spending a lot of time working with shapes. We have been drawing shapes, talking about the characteristics of shapes (how many sides, straight or curved lines) and today we used a new app called Geoboards to create shapes using virtual rubber bands. Most students can identify the basic shapes (circle, oval, square, rectangle, triangle) but we are also working to identify hexagons and trapezoids as well. Those two shapes are now considered "basic" shapes in Kindergarten. Times have changed...

Tomorrow we will work on building 3-D figures (cylinder, sphere, cone, and cube) with playdough. The concept of 3-Dimensional can be tricky so I think the kiddos need to create those figures and hold
them in their hands in order to really understand and learn about what they look like. I'm pretty sure the kiddos are going to be really excited about the play dough!

January 7th-11th

Welcome back and Happy New Year!

Reminders & Info

Next week on January 17th we have DIBELS testing at Durham. DIBELS is our school wide reading assessment that allows us to check in students' progress and to determine which students would benefit from additional reading support. 

Students received their snowmen, which is our January family project. Projects can be turned in anytime next week. The official due date is Tuesday January 22nd. Please let me know if you need any additional supplies for your creation. 

Reading & Writing

This week we started a three week unit on the topic of Food. Our vocabulary words this week were farmer and market. We read a story called Apple Farmer Annie and the kiddos worked on retelling the events of the story using picture cues with a partner. We also read a non-fiction piece on the process of making strawberry jam called From Strawberry Field to Strawberry Jam. We are continuing to work on informative/explanatory writing, so as a pre-writing activity, students used StoryKit to record the steps for making strawberry jam that we learned from the story. We practiced using the words first, next, and 

last. The goals for informative/explanatory writing in Kindergarten are for students to:

• Identify a topic about which they are writing (Dictation or Writing)
• Supply information about the topic (Dictation or Writing)
• Demonstrate proficiency in proper spacing between most words and word placement on lines (Writing)
• Capitalize the first word in a sentence and the pronoun "I" (Writing)
• Write letters for most consonant and short vowel words (Writing)
• Spell simple words phonetically (Writing)

Those are end of the year goals so we are working towards them and focusing on be able to organize and tell information at this point. 

This week we covered the sounds /ch/, /j/, and /v/. We are very close to completing our third unit which means the students are now using their skills to hear a word and "break it down" (or sound it out) in order to write it down. 

Our letter of the week this week is F and our sight word is "play."

Math

We are continuing to practice 5-groups. Our math program includes extensive practice with the intention that students will become proficient in knowing how to separate numbers into a group of five and extras which is building automaticity in basic math facts. Utilizing basic math facts is a necessary math skill that will be used in many grades to come, so, although it may seem like we practice the same thing over and over, it is with purpose. 

We have also been reviewing basic shapes which include circle, square, rectangle, oval, triangle, trapezoid, and hexagon. Today we did another shape picture similar to the tree and snowman that came home before break. These activities involve coloring the shapes according to the directions, cutting out the shapes, and assembling the shapes to create a new image. I modified today's activity a bit in that I didn't model for the students how to arrange the shapes once they were cut out. Instead I asked the class to think of a way they could go together and I got some very creative ideas. My original thought was a barn, yet I had students arrange the shapes to make a house, a school, a hotel, a tree house, and a secret fort.