**Come One, Come All to Irving School's OPEN HOUSE/CURRICULUM NIGHT on Thursday, September 22nd from 6:30-7:30 pm. I will be speaking to parents at 6:30 for about 30 minutes on our class routine, classroom management, special area classes, assessments in Kindergarten, Route to Reading specific skills groupings and all curriculum. You can drop off your child in the auditorium for a supervised special feature before you come to see me. I will also have handouts with other information on our year. There will also be SIGN UP SHEETS for PARENT CONFERENCES and other COOL EVENTS on the table outside of my room. Please pick up your child after my presentation and they will become your TOUR GUIDES as they bring you to meet the teachers who will be working with them. I will give you a list with teacher names and room numbers as an assist. Hope to see everyone!
**The ALL SCHOOL FRIDAY PACERS RUNNING/WALKING CLUB began on Friday. The students were really fired up to run around the block and get their card marked. The students each have a bracelet and for each time they run around the block, they will get a foot charm. We will be making a special envelope to keep our bracelet in. The special envelope will go on our PACERS CHART. At the end of the year......each child will have a great bracelet FULL of feet charms.
**All KRT and DIBELS Testing is completed. I will be working on Aimsweb Math Baseline and Phonic Screeners this coming week as I continue planning for your child's academic trimester.
**The students checked out their first book from the Irving Library. It is due next next Wednesday. Please keep the book in your child's back pack when not reading. Next week, the students will be able to check out 2 books!
**Eagle Extra Classes begin on Monday, September 26th. I will be getting a list of the participants from my class. The students will be picked up from my class by an adult supervisor and taken to the auditorium to be picked up by the Eagle Extras teacher. There are some cool after school classes. Check it out!
**Mr. Packer's Thinking Skills Sessions will begin this coming Tuesday. He will use small group and whole group activities and projects to encourage thinking outside of the box.
All lessons will be taught on multi levels to support and to challenge all learners. Stay tuned!
**I continue to work with our Computer Tech to secure usernames and passwords for our Kindergarten students. I am hoping to complete this sometime this week. We can then proceed with iPad Boot Camp for Kinders.
**In Friendship Club this week, Dr. Bell Bey reviewed with students what whole body learning is and began the conversation about the ZONES of REGULATION......or how to regulate your own behavior! I will be sending you some information on this in the coming weeks.
**Fall Class and Individual Pictures will be taken on Tuesday, October 11th. I usually try for an early morning time.
**Our FIRST FIELD TRIP--Morton Arboretum on Thursday, October 27th from 9-1:30. This trip will enhance and support our very first SCIENCE UNIT--TREES and WEATHER. Look for more information soon! I will need some parent volunteers to come with us.
**Our BOOK BUDDIES this year are the students from Ms. Balicki's 5th Grade Class. We are in the process of arranging our first meeting! Each Kindergarten student will be matched up with a 5th grade buddy. We will be meeting roughly every month and sharing stories, writing, projects. So Fun!!!
**Future Events: Irving School's Annual Egg Drop and Academic Fair to be held on Wednesday, October 19th all day and in the evening. I will be sending out information on this very awesome event that even a Kindergarten student can participate in! Also.....Each classroom will be a part of the Fun Run Fundraiser on Friday, October 14th at 8:15 am. It is one of our PTO's biggest fundraising events of the year. Stay tuned!
This week:
It was all about letters and numbers. The students found letters and numbers throughout our classroom and school. What is the difference between letters and numbers? The students began a conversation about consonants (letters that have 1-2 sounds) and vowels ( letters that can have many different sounds.) The students found the consonants and vowels in their name. They then compared that number to the number of consonants and vowels in a friend's name. We are counting everything in sight--chairs, markers, feet, socks, plates, fingers shoes etc. The students worked on their number formation rhymes 0-8. Station Day activities included pattern block create/count/record, creating a specific number tower and recording the number, letter/sound activity and experimenting with our tripod grasp strengthening activities.
Reading/Language Arts: The students are working to complete Week 3 of our prep for our Treasures Reading series called Smart Start. They continued their work on imprinting sound and observing what their mouth does when they create a certain sound. It was great fun but also fascinating to see the students experiment with small mirrors when reproducing target sounds. They "elbow chatted" with a partner to describe what the sound of Bb or the sound of Cc looks like. Pretty cool! Opened or closed mouth? puff of air? vibration in the throat? where is your tongue? We reviewed rhyming sequences and our current sight words. The students used their sight words, pictures and ending marks for sentence building with a partner. Each student built 2 sentences to read to their partner. The partner did the same. Planning, recall and tracking from left to right were in play in this activity.
The students worked on their first read aloud paper story, "I Can!" They worked on listening and following along with their "famous pointing finger" as a student read. We reviewed what a sentence does----it is a group of words that names and tells! The students found the title, the front and back cover and the spine even though it was very skinny. What is this story about? How do you know? The students continued to work on tracking words in a sentence from left to right, noting that a sentence begins with an uppercase letter and has an ending mark. Finger pointing is essential!! During our workstations students chose from a group of sight word texts to read to themselves and then read to a partner and "elbow chat" about the title, characters and setting.
The students did their first formative blueprint with prompting and support. Again, we used the formative text, "Chrysanthemum." The goal for the students was to draw and write about the characters, setting, main event and why the event is important. Quite a task! In the beginning, drawing pictures and talking about key concepts is happening. I am providing support by recoding what the students tell me. Some students did some writing and labeling. As we work throughout the year on this format, more and more writing will occur. We will begin our next formative text,"Duck on a Bike" next week.
The students continue work on foundational skills in the Haggerty Blue Book which included letter naming, rhyming, initial and final sounds, syllables, adding, substituting and deleting word parts and counting words in a sentence.
Math: The student work on calendar books is becoming more routine. Morning math activities included a shape hunt around the room looking for basic shapes as well as pattern block shapes. Students looked for circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, ovals, trapezoids, hexagons and rhombuses. The students also continue work on number formation 0-8 reciting their number form rhymes and using their white boards and dry erase markers. The students also continued using games and activities that reinforced counting and cardinality. Our afternoon math session focused on our new Eureka Math curriculum. This weeks lessons were all about analyzing to find 2 objects that are exactly the same or not exactly the same, analyzing to find 2 similar objects--these are the same but....and classifying to find 2 objects that share a visual pattern, color and use. Student are also learning common terminology and participated in counting beans and fingers and learning to count following the number glove. ( I will show you this on curriculum night.) Math workstations included animal picnic--set the table with plate and cup that reflect visual classification of pattern, color and use, egg carton math, number writing 0-8, spin a number, shape create/count/record and working with attribute blocks classifying with a partner.
Writing: The students are learning that lines make letters. They looked at straight lines, slant and curved lines. Using the Handwriting Without Tears format, each student used the wooden pieces to make the first letter in their name. The students used the lines to form MAT MAN. We even sang a song about him. MAT MAN has all the lines that writers use to form letters to make words. Next week we will begin formal letter formation learning our Frog Jump Capitals. The students experimented with the tripod grasp activity box. (I will share it with you on curriculum night.) In Writer's Workshop this week, the students shared pieces of their writing. We talked again about how writers write what they know about. Using our idea web, the student made idea "light bulbs" drawing and sketching subjects and using stickers to show ideas they can write about. We also talked about the idea that "instead of saying we are done," we can go back and see if we can add anything else to our drawing... a detail.....something that makes our drawing/writing clearer to us and to others that we share it with.
Technology: The students continue to participate by using apps that are projected on the screen. In reading, the students used the app Sound Sort to match pictures according to their letter sound. They continue to delight in setting their sight words, letters and numbers on "fire" using the app Fire Finger." In math, I introduced the app Easy Match working on matching quantity to number and examining number patterns.
Literature: "Curious George Goes to School," "Mean Jean the Recess Queen," "Chrysanthemum," "I Can," "At School," "We Go to School," "It's Okay to Make Mistakes," "David Goes to School,"
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