Sunday, September 8, 2013

UPDATES for 9/3-9/6 2013

**The students are becoming more familiar with our daily routine and expectations of all their teachers and classes.  Lunch time is going well!  The students are learning to eat their main entre first, clean up and recycle their milk cartons and tray.  A special shout out to our parent volunteers at lunch!  You have helped make a big difference!  We have one more week of parent helpers.  If you would like to help, just meet us out on the playground at 11:45 am.
**No School on Friday, September 13th.  It is a Teacher's Institute Day.
**COME ONE, COME ALL to Irving School's OPEN HOUSE/CURRICULUM NIGHT on Thursday, September 12th.  The schedule is as follows:  PARENTS ONLY from 6:30-7:00 pm.  You can drop off your child in the auditorium for a supervised special feature.  I will be speaking about our daily routine, all subject areas and all curriculum will be displayed for you to look at.  I will also have handouts with other information on our year.  There will be a SIGN UP SHEET for PARENT CONFERENCES and OTHER FUN EVENTS.  Please pick up your child at 7:00 pm in the auditorium and let them be your TOUR GUIDE as they bring you to meet the teachers who will be working with them this year.  I will give you a list with the teacher's name, subject and room number as an assist.  Don't forget--from 6:30-7:00 pm is PARENTS ONLY in my classroom.  Hope to see everyone on Thursday.
**The students took out their first library book this week.  The books can remain out for 7 days.  At the next library time, your child can select a new book.  Please keep the book in the back pack when not in use.  Thanks!
**The students had their first Friendship Club meeting with Ms. Bell Bey, our social worker.  She will be working with the class on a variety of lessons centering around fostering positive peer relationships, feelings, conflict resolution, sharing, bullying and other topics.  She will use a variety of materials and approaches including stories, role playing, acting, games, videos, puppets to name a few. 
**Our weekly schedule is near completion.  I am working on securing a computer lab time and time with Mr. Packer, our Math Enrichment teacher.  He will be coming into the class weekly to work on higher level thinking skills and problem solving with whole and small groups of students.
**DIBELS Testing is almost complete.  Next week I will be giving a PHONICS SCREENER to each child.  These assessments will help in determining each students placement in our skill specific ROUTE TO READING groups.  You will hear much more about this at CURRICULUM NIGHT.
**If you are placing an order with SCHOLASTIC BOOKS.....the order is due September 12th.
**The students continue to learn about the process of earning indiviual EAGLE SLIPS and how a whole class can earn a class EAGLE SLIP.  This is conjunction with our school wide PBIS behavior incentive.  Many of the students have gotten them already.  Mr. Hodge will put his hand in the big box each week and pull out 6 winners and one class winner.  GUESS WHAT!!!!!  Let's give a shout out to Philippe and Colin as one of the first EAGLE SLIP winners!!  We were cheering so loud for Philippe that we did not hear Colin's named called too!  I found out about it after school.  So Colin......you will pick your prize on Monday.    Let's keep up the good work!
This week:
It was all about the students continued effort to feel comfortable with their daily routine and meet all of their teachers for the year.  It was also about ABC's everywhere!!  What do they look like?  How do they sound?  What does our mouth do when we say them?  Many sounds?  Only one or two sounds?   Uppercase?   Lowercase?  What happens when we put letters together?  The students experienced many activities surrounding the alphabet.
Reading/Social Studies:    The students are continuing to work on their prep for our Treasures reading series using SMART START.   The students are focusing on letter recognition and sounds for A-M.  They are learning about imprinting sound and how our mouth looks when we make that sound.  The students are using mirrors to really see what happens when a sound is produced.  Is their mouth open or closed?  Is their air coming out of their mouth?  Is there a vibration in their throat?  Lots to think about!!  The students are learning to work with me to create word webs on suggested topics--What do we do in Kindergarten?  What do hands do?  How do we look?  These exercises generate conversation and participation that stimulate oral vocabulary.  The students continue to listen to rhyming patterns in words.  They are learning to chant the ending.  An example would be--bat, cat they both have at.  Rhyming words have the same ending part.  The students continue to work on their sight words.  The words I, can, am, yes, no, go, red, blue have been introduced.  The students played . "Hands Up, Hands Down."  The students listened to the big book story, "Hands Can."  They made predictions about story content.  In working with our Common Core Standards, we discussed what an AUTHOR is and what he does.  We also talked about the ILLUSTRATOR and their job.  The students also worked on the story elements--CHARACTERS and SETTING.  As I read the story, the students are watching as I model tracking each word from left to right as I read.  The story was read a second time and the students made connections in their own lives about what their hands can do.  The students read aloud their paper story, "I Can."  They practiced finger pointing each word and picture from left to right.  Together we worked on story structure and sequence.  In our Haggerty Blue Book exercises, the students continue to work on letter naming, rhyming, blending,  saying the beginning sound,  segmenting and substituting sounds and counting how many words there are in a given sentence.  Our workstations this week included playing "Go Fish for Letters," "Alphabet Bingo," Sound Sorting Board,  sequencing uppercase letters, upper and lowercase match, "Hands Up, Hands Down" sight words, oral comprehension and story retelling and iPAd activity AlphaTots (letters and sounds.)
Math:    The students worked on a variety of Common Core number recognition/counting activities including Egg Carton Math, Listen and Count building number boards, "Got It," Number Object Match and sorting and classifying in their workstations.  We did a class activity called the "Name Train" where the students write their name, one letter in each box and place one cube in the box for each letter in their name.  They connect the cubes to form a train and then they went around comparing--Is my name train longer or shorter then yours?  Who has the longest name train?  the shortest?  the dame?  The student took their name boxes and glue them on chart paper reflecting shortest to longest.  We talked about the patterns we see around us.  Students were able to point out a color and shape pattern on our calendar.  The students continue to work on our calendar with number order and counting in our ten frame.  On our AGE CHANGE CHART--Ethan and Ever have moved to the land of the six year olds!!  The students reviewed basic flat shapes--Circle, Square, Rectangle and Triangle.  We did the "SHAPE RAP."  Cool!  The students also worked on positional words--ABOVE, BELOW, BETWEEN, IN THE MIDDLE.
Writing:    The students are learning about the types of lines we use to form letters--straight, curved, slanted.  The students used these lines to form MAT MAN.  We even learned a song about him.   Students used the body image in MAT MAN to make their own "One thing you should know about me" portrait.  They are up in the room.  Too cute!!!!  We are working on strengthening hands and fingers.  We used clay to do this.  Kneading, squishing, rolling are good ways to get those hands and fingers moving.  We even made some letters with straight, slant and curved clay snakes!  The students are using journal prompts from our Treasures series.  During journal conferencing, I ask the student to tell about this drawing, maybe chose a picture and write the first sound they hear, maybe see if they can write all the sounds they hear in the word they use to describe their picture and just maybe they want to write a sentence (a group of words that names and tells) about their picture.  Students will use  "inventive spelling"--just what they hear--it could be just the beginning sound, ending sound.  Many times the vowel is omitted.  This is the beginning of the acquisition of sound foundation.  Let them spell what they hear!
Technology:    We are just at the beginning stages of iPAd use.  I am using them with small groups of students.  We are learning the use and care of the iPad.  More on this next week!
Literature:     "Schools Around the World." "Smile If Your Human." "Alphabet Mystery." "Little Blue, Little Yellow," "If You Take A Mouse To School," "How Do Dinosaurs Go To School?" "The Quiet Book," "When You Go To Kindergarten."



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