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.