Learning...

The end of school is fast approaching, but we are still learning and working hard in the classroom.  We just completed Unit 5 of Reading Street and will be moving into Unit 6.  This particular unit has a lot of review and preparation for 1st grade.  We will begin to review all sight words learned this year.  We will be assessing all the sight words and your child needs to know all the words to receive a P on their report card.  Many children are doing well; however, the words "where, what, come, was" are words which the children confuse often.  The unit theme is building and we will be delving into the question "What are different ways of building?" and we will be reading "Building with Dad."

We have been working on DIBELS this past week and will continue this coming week.  We will send home results once we have all children tested and the results are placed in the computer system.  We will try our best to send home results during the week of May 20th.  After reviewing some of the results, we are very pleased.  We want to thank you for your help at home.  Please continue to practice letters, sound, and just reading for fun!

We have been working hard on story writing in our writing time.  The children are doing a great job developing a story with a beginning, middle, and end.  Some children have written non-fiction pieces about plants and some have written narrative stories about themselves.  We want all children to be able to write a simple story with a beginning, middle, and end.  We are encouraging some children to be developing stories with 2 sentences on each page.  We are also looking for capital letters, punctuation, and spacing.

Working on Writing...

Writing Fun...

The children are doing a great job with their writing.  We have been working on capital letters at the beginning of a sentence and end punctuation.  We have also talked about spacing and using "spaceman" to remind us to put a space between our words.  We will be working on stories with a beginning, middle, and end in the next couple of weeks.  I love this time as the children become even better writers!

Another Great Week...

Last week we had our DIBELS assessment and I was impressed with how well the children did and showed what they know!  You will be receiving their scores later this week as we finish up a few children who were absent.  In addition, we will review these scores with you at conferences.  If you receive your scores and you have a concern please do not hesitate to give us a call and we will talk with you about it.  Please remember if your child did not make the benchmark this may mean we will want to do some intervention with your child to help them in a particular area.  Furthermore, if your child made the benchmark closely, we may want to continue an intervention because we want your child to be strong in all areas.

We will continue into reading street this week.  We will be focusing on the letter Ff and the sight words look and see.  Another word, which is not a sight word, but is important is and.  We will be introducing this word to the children as well.  We will be continuing our work with story plots (beginning, middle, and end) and the characters in a story.  The children will also be working on their writing.  We are looking for children to have "control" over their writing.  This means the words and letters are on a line, legible, and spacing.  Every morning your child will have a chance to practice this skill.  You can see how your child is progressing when you check their folder nightly.

In math, we are going to continue to work with teen numbers.  We will be also pairing it with ordering numbers.  Children will begin to order numbers up to 20.  The children will be also learning the game "steal the card."  This is where one child takes a card and the other child has to figure out which card they took.  The children have to then order the numbers to figure out which one is missing.  This typically becomes a favorite game of the classroom.  You can do this at home too.

One of the most exciting parts of this week will be the introduction of computers at our centers.  Children will be able to explore the computer.  We will be using the website www.starfall.com to help us learn the components of the computer.  This particular website is great and diverse as children can explore letters, words, reading, numbers, adding, etc.  I know the children will be very excited when we begin this center!

Have a great week!

Kidwriting...

I love writing; however, I did not like writing as a child and writing during school was not fun. When I reflect upon why I did not like writing growing up it was because I was never allowed to write what I wanted and no one encouraged me to write creatively in school. Writing was all about grammar and writing to a specific prompt. I do believe it is important for children to learn to write to prompts, but not every time during every writing block how I was taught! I have taken my experiences of writing and used it in the positive and writing has turned into my FAVORITE thing to teach, along with math (I would say these two areas are tied)! When I think about the experiences I want for Kindergartners today, I want them to love writing, which I think they do. When I mention it is time for Writer's Notebooks...they have smiles on their faces and some even clap. I encourage children to take their experiences and write about it (using pictures or words). I use their writing to help develop the grammar compenents and sentence structure. I move around the room and give individual instruction to each child with their writing while focusing on a specific goal. For example, the goal might be to use a capital letter at the beginning and the rest lowercase. As I move around the room I talk to the children about their writing, but we look at the capital and lowercase letters.

I have spoken about Kidwriting in the past; however, I wanted to come back and revisit this idea. The children are beginning to develop a strong sense of the alphabet (letters and sounds). This is one of the things I love about writing because it encompasses reading too! They are able to hear the sounds and then write those on paper. If you notice your child writing at home or making stories, have them bring it into school and they may share it at the beginning or end of the day! I love seeing what the kids are doing at school.

Here is Mr. Harry explaining parts of Kidwriting...