UPDATES for 8/24-26 2011

**Once again--WELCOME NEW KINDERGARTEN STUDENTS AND FAMILIES!!! I am so glad you are a part of the Irving School family. I was happy to meet all of you. We are going to have a great year!
**Thanks to all who have signed up to help with LUNCH for the next 3 weeks. The students are learning about the lunch routine and about recycling and composting material. Please keep reinforcing---HOME LUNCH or SCHOOL LUNCH----MILK---WHAT KIND? Our volunteers and myself are working on students eating their MAIN ENTRE first, whether it is a sandwich, salad etc. and then eating fruit, granola bars, pudding etc. Thanks for sending such good choices in their home lunches.
**Keep sending in supplies if you have not done so.
**Please remember--gym shoes and socks on GYM days.
**The Back to School Party at Barrie Park was a blast! It was great chatting with many of you.
** I will be setting up the LEXIA, SPELLING CITY, XTRAMATH and TREASURES (our new reading series) sites hopefully in the next few weeks. These are great skill building activities on line for your child to access at home. Starfall.com is up and running. It is located on the left side under resources.
**No School on Monday, September 5th--Labor Day
This week:
It was all about routines and expectations! Yes, I talked a lot! Our daily schedule is slowly taking shape. The students are meeting their special area teachers. We are getting to know each other and fostering new friendships. The students learned how to earn EAGLE SLIPS for our School wide PBIS Behavior Initiative.
Reading: This week the students began a 3 week prep in our new TREASURES Reading Series called START SMART. The students worked on using their language skills by responding to a Daily Warm Up question. They worked on their listening comprehension and making predictions and connections by listening to the story "Animals in the Park-An ABC Book." The students worked on identifying a sequence of sounds using the nursery rhyme, "Hey Diddle Diddle." We reviewed the letters Aa and Bb and the sounds they make. The sight word, I was introduced along with red, blue, yes and no. We learned how to play the Hands Up, Hands Down game to help reinforce our sight vocabulary. The students were introduced to a wordless pre-decodable story, "We Go to School." They learned about book handling, locating title, author name and making inferences about what they think the story is about using the title and cover pictures. We told the story together as we looked at each page and then the students partnered up and retold the story to their partner. In our Haggerty Blue Book exercises the students worked on recognizing rhyming words, segmenting words, adding and taking away word parts and counting how many words are in a specific sentence.
Math: The students were introduced to our calendar and weather chart routines. We are adding a number each day we are in school to our worm. When we get to the number 100--PARTY!!!! The students did an activity called "Partner Match," where they found a partner who had the same length of paper that they did. We compared the lengths and ranked them from shortest to longest. The students worked on recognizing numbers 0-12, counting backward from 10-0 and recognizing basic shapes. We learned to play "Got It." During choice activity time, the students explored using unifix cubes, gears, pattern blocks and tiles. We worked on the positional words--top and bottom.
Writing: The students discussed what a journal was. They used the writing prompts from the TREASURES lesson. They drew a picture of themselves and wrote their name. They drew a picture of one of their classmates and labeled the picture with the name. The students began to explore the types of lines used in making a letter.
Literature: "What's My Name," "Wemberly Worried," "David Goes to School," "Kindergarten Rocks," "David Gets in Trouble," "First Day Jitters."
**All homework assignments are posted on my teacher website under assignments.