**The students are becoming more familiar with our daily routines and expectations of all of their teachers and classes. Lunch is going well! The students are learning to eat their main entre first, drink all of their beverage and recycle school lunch trays and milk cartons. A big shout out to our parent volunteers at lunch! You have helped make a big difference. Next week will be our final week of parent helpers. I believe I have 2 parents signed up. If you would like to help, just meet us out on the playground at noon.
**The Irving Back to School Party was rained out. Bummer!!! We all were hoping it would clear up! On the bright side---next week looks like very comfortable weather.
**COME ONE, COME ALL TO Irving School's OPEN HOUSE/CURRICULUM NIGHT on Thursday, September 11th beginning at 6:30 pm. The schedule is as follows: A PARENT ONLY Curriculum Overview for Kindergarten families is from 6:30-7:00 pm in our classroom. 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, testing that is done in Kindergarten, Route to Reading skills specific groupings and special area classes. I will also have handouts with other information on our year. There will be a SIGN UP SHEET for PARENT CONFERENCES, ROOM PARENTS SIGN UP (I have 2 so far) and OTHER FUN EVENTS. Please pick up your child in the auditorium at 7:00 pm and let them be your TOUR GUIDE as they bring you to meet the teachers who will be working with them. 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!
**We will have our first LIBRARY TIME with teacher librarian, Ms. Noonan on Monday morning. The students will be able to take out a book from the library and keep it out for 7 days until the next library time. After awhile, the students will be able to take out 2 books. Ms. Noonan will be reading many types of fiction and nonfiction books, helping with projects and showing the students how the library is organized and where to find certain books. It is recommended that if a student is not reading his/her library book....it should be kept in their backpack for safe keeping.
**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, videos, role playing, acting, games, puppets to name a few. This week, Ms. Bell Bey showed a video on school rules and being ready to learn and being a social detective knowing how to respond to different situations.
**The students also had their first meeting with Mr. Packer who will work with the students on problem solving skills and higher level thinking skills. He played a cool name game to get to know each student and remember their name.
**Last week I began screening students with the DIBELS test and a PHONOLOGICAL SCREENER. 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.
**We had our first FIRE DRILL on Friday. We talked at length about a practice to help us get out of the building safely and quickly in the event of a fire. The students did a super job of following directions. We even got to see the Fire Chief! We will be having fire drills periodically during the school year.
**Don't forget--a healthy snack each day. Gym shoes and socks for gym days.
**The students continue to learn about the process of earning an individual Eagle Slip and how the whole class an earn an Eagle Slip. This is in conjunction with our school wide PBIS behavior incentive. Many students have gotten Eagle Slips this past week!! Yeah!!! Every Friday, Mr. Hodge will put his hand in the big purple box and pull out 10 lucky winners. Lily's Eagle Slip was drawn the first week of school and she got to pick a prize!
**School Pictures will be taken on Tuesday, September 30th. More info to follow.
**Don't forget to check out the cool after school Eagle Extra classes handed out last week. Email me with any questions.
This week:
It was all about the students continued effort to feel comfortable with daily routines and meet all of their teachers for the year. It was also about ABC's everywhere! Why do we need them? 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/Language Arts: 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 letters 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 letter sound is produced. Is their mouth open or closed? Is there 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 end in at. Rhyming words have the same ending part. The students continue to work on their sight words--I, can, am, yes, no. The students listened to the Big Book story, "Hands Can." We discussed the TITLE and found the TITLE PAGE and SPINE of the book. The students also talked about the job of an AUTHOR and ILLUSTRATOR. They have also begun to notice certain story elements such as WHO is in the story (characters) and WHERE the story takes place (setting.) As I read the story, the students are watching as I model tracking each word from the left to the right as I read. The story was read a second time and the students made connections in their own lives about what their hands do. The students read aloud from their paper story, "I Can." They practiced finger pointing each word and picture. Together, we worked on story structure and sequence. The students then practiced their reading to a partner. 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 small group workstations this week included Alphabet Bingo, "Go Fish for Letters," sound sorting board, sequencing upper and lowercase letters, upper and lowercase match, stamping your name, "Hands Up, Hands Down" sight word swat and oral comprehension and story retelling.
Math: This year District 97 has added the curriculum, My Math along with Everyday Math to support the teaching of the math Common Core Standards. Students worked on a number of recognition/counting activities including Egg Carton Math, Listen and Count, building number boards, "Got It," Number/Object Match, sorting and classifying in their small group workstations. We did a whole class activity called, "Name Train" where the students wrote their name, one letter in each box and place one cube in the box for each letter in their name. They connected 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? Shortest? The same number of cubes? They each counted how many letters they had in their name box and matched it with the number on our big chart. Who had the most letters in their name??? (10) Ask you child! We talked about the patterns we see around us. The students noted the shape and color pattern on our calendar. The students continued to work using the calendar for number sequencing and counting. We are using a ten frame to keep track of how many days we have been in school. Our AGE CHANGE CHART has everyone's picture on it waiting for their birthday so they can make the change. Ethan has already moved to the land of the 6 year olds! The students reviewed basic flat shapes--circle, square, triangle, rectangle and positional words--ABOVE, BELOW, BETWEEN, IN THE MIDDLE.
Writing: The students are learning about what types of lines we use to form letters--straight, curved and 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 displayed in our room. Too cute! We are working on strengthening our hands and fingers. We use clay to do this. Kneading, squishing, rolling are good ways to get our hands and fingers moving. We even made some letters with straight, curved and slant snakes! In Writer's Workshop, the students the students talked about writing about ideas that interest them. This week, the topics were friends, family, animals, what you like to do at home. During our journal conferencing, the student may have tried to write words, the first of a word in their picture, label one of the pictures or tried to write a complete sentence. We just begun to chat about what a sentence is--a group of words that NAMES and TELLS. Students will use "inventive spelling" just what they hear--it could be just the beginning sound, beginning and ending sound. Many times the vowel will be omitted. This is just the beginning of their sound foundation. Let them spell what they hear!
Technology: We are just in the beginning stages of iPad use. We are learning about iPad care and operation in our classroom. More on this next week.
Literature: "Pirates Go To School," "Crazy Hair Day," "Two Eyes, A Nose, A Mouth," "When Dinosaurs Go To School," "The Recess Queen," "What Will the Fat Cat Sit On," "This is the Teacher," "The Mixed Up Alphabet," "Cool Dog, School Dog," "Hands Can," "I Measure Myself," (poem) "Schools Around the World," "New Bear At School."
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