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!