Classroom News

We have been hard at work in Kindergarten recently! Our routines are starting to fall into place, and the class is doing such a nice job of following directions, treating friends kindly, and doing their best work each day. Below are a few pictures and summaries of what we have been doing during our time together!

Literacy

The past two weeks, we have really mastered our Jolly Phonics notebook routines! Each day, we introduce a new Jolly Phonics sound, learn the song and motion to help us remember the sound, and work together to create two examples of a word that starts with that sound. We work together to stretch the sounds out in the word and try to match the sounds we hear to their letters to write the word. Thank you for your support at home with the third box for homework! It's fun to see what example they come up with!

As our procedures for reading routines are falling into place, you may notice the blue book bag in your child's backpack has two plastic bags inside with a growing collection. The smaller bag contains sight word cards. So far we only have three, I, can, and we. You can use these flashcards to help your child practice their sight word recognition at home. The larger bag contains paper mini books that go with the sight word of the week. We will keep adding to these bags! These are great ways to practice the sight words in context. Please keep reviewing these at home with your child, and keep them in the blue bag in their backpack. Once our Guided Reading routines begin (where I will meet with small reading groups at their varying instructional levels), you will also see a book at your child's reading level in the bag to practice.

During literacy time, we have also been working on our handwriting, and practicing our writing with a project to learn more about something each friend in our class likes to do!

We have enjoyed several read aloud stories as well, including a few Pete the Cat books, as well has the books Alphabet Rescue, Alphabet Mystery, and Alphabet Adventure, as we focused on letter recognition.

Math

Our first unit in math is underway, and we are learning about numbers from 1-5 in depth, and are working on identifying what is the same and what is different about various objects. We also identified matching objects, and used math manipulatives to practice making a match with our partners. We have practiced sorting objects by attributes such as color, shape, and size. This helped solidify our thinking and made it easier to discuss with our partners why objects are similar or different.

We have also been using our Handwriting Without Tears materials and routines to practice correct number formation as we introduce each number. We first practice on our chalkboards with a small sponge, then a pom pom to trace & dry, and then chalk to trace. After practicing on our chalkboards, we use our pencils to trace and write in our Handwriting Without Tears notebooks!

LMC

We enjoyed visiting the LMC for a book tasting and checking out books. I loved seeing the enthusiasm these little ones have for checking out library books! Our book checkout day will be on TUESDAYS!

Whole Body Listening

This week, Mrs. Rebsamen, our Speech/Language Pathologist, joined us to teach us about Whole Body Listening. She read us a story about Listening Larry, which taught us the importance of listening with our eyes, ears, mouths, hands, feet, bodies, brains, and hearts!

When the class is demonstrating good whole body listening, caring behavior, or doing a fantastic job in general, we can earn a piece of our whole class behavior board! We are currently working on a gumball themed board. When we fill the board, we will get a special reward such as extra recess time, a class spirit day of our choosing, a short movie, or other privileges voted on by the class!

I think most of our Kindergarten friends would agree that centers are their favorite part of Kindergarten! They have been doing a wonderful job of learning how to share, take turns, work together, and handle disappointment that may occur during center time. This week, we participated in centers that were all Chester the Raccoon themed. He's one of our favorite characters! We matched lowercase and uppercase letters, matched numerals to collections of objects with that number, did a roll and cover number game, and played a version of the Memory game with characters from the Chester books. Next week, we will introduce name centers where we work with letters and spelling our names and the names of our classmates in various fun ways!