**The students are becoming more familiar with our daily routines and expectations of all of their teachers and classes. Lunch is going well! At lunch, we are reinforcing eating our main entre first, drinking our beverages and recycling the school lunch trays and mild cartons. Don't forget to send a healthy snack each day! The students are learning to get out their snack and water bottles and place them on the bench next to their name. There is then less confusion about what is lunch and what is a snack.
**Thanks for seeing that your child's HOMEWORK FOLDER is in their backpack each THURSDAY. Students are learning to take out their homework and put it in the homework box. It was great sharing the "Getting to know me Heads." They are now up in our classroom. Games and paper stories can remain home in a secure place for future review. A reminder to please check HOMEWORK FOLDERS every FRIDAY for homework and other school information. You can also check the assignments page on my website for activities and due dates.
**It was fun to see some of you at the Irving Back to School Party. There was no movie due to the weather, but plenty of pizza!
**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 your child off 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. 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 teachers name, subject and room number as an assist. Hope to see everyone!
**I am continuing to finish KRT testing and also baseline assessments (DIBELS and AIMSWEB MATH and PHONIC SCREENERS, as well as baseline letter and number recognition in order to best plan for your child's academic trimester.
**The students had their first FRIENDSHIP CLUB meeting with Dr. Bell Bey, our social worker. She will be working with our class on a variety of lessons centering around fostering positive peer relationships and activities that support our Second Step Lessons. Stories, games, videos, role playing, acting and puppets are just a few ways she will approach a lesson. This week, Dr. Bell Bey gave an overview about being ready to learn and school manners.
**The students had their first LIBRARY meeting with Ms. Noonan, teacher librarian. Next week, the students will be able to check out a book and take it home for 7 days until the next library time. They return the book and can take out a new one. Ms. Noonan will be reading many types of fiction and nonfiction stories, helping with projects and showing the students how the library is organized, how to find certain books and assisting in supporting our Common Core Curriculum.
**We will have our first meeting with GTD Mr. Packer and his THINKING SKILLS sessions next week. He will be be working with whole and small class groupings.
**In the next few weeks, everything should be ready to our intro to iPad Boot Camp for our Kinders. I will keep you posted.
**Don't forget--Gym shoes on Gym days!
This Week:
It was all about the student's continued effort to feel comfortable with our daily routines and meet all of their teachers for the year. It was about ABC'S everywhere! Why do we need them? What do they look like? How do they sound? What does our mouth look like when we say them? Many sounds? One sound? Uppercase? Lowercase? What happens when we put letters together? Station Day activities included creating a paper doll of themselves, creating a hand print, building with cubes and counting how many, building their number board and experimenting with the math games taught this week.
Reading/Language Arts: The students continue to work on their prep for our Treasures Reading series using Smart Start. The students focused on letter recognition and sound foundation. They are learning about imprinting sound and how our mouth looks when we make that sound. What happens when a sound is produced? Is your mouth opened or closed? Can you feel a vibration in your throat? Can you feel air coming out of your mouth? Let's think about it! The students are working 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 vocabulary. Students continue to listen for rhyming patterns in words. They are learning to chant the ending. Our mantra or chant is for example--cat, bat they end in at.
Students have begun work on sight word recognition. Words presented this week were YES, NO, I, GO, AM, CAN. We played "Hands Up, Hands Down" using our word cards. The students are working on tracking words from left to right in our days of the week reads. They are also counting the number of words in each sentence.
In our formative text study, using the story "Chrysanthemum," the students continue finding the title, front/back cover and spine of the book. Once again, we discussed the job of the author and illustrator. This week, we talked about who is in the story (characters) and where the story happens (setting.) We used the term event to describe something that happens in the story. The students began work on a group Blueprint Workmat identifying the characters, setting and important events they remembered from the story. Prior to this, some students volunteered to act out their favorite part. I projected the mat on our board and students helped me by drawing pictures or helping me with writing. The students will eventually complete their own individual Blueprint Workmat on selected stories. Pretty cool!
The students continued work on foundational skills using the Haggerty Blue Book. Whole group instruction, aided by our reading puppet, Mr. Happy, centered on upper and lowercase recognition, counting words in a sentence, isolating the beginning and ending sounds and counting word parts and beginning work on syllables. Small group workstations included letter hunt, rhyming board game, sequencing ABC's, beginning sound sequence and "Hands Up, Hands Down" using their sight words.
Math: The students are working in their daily Calendar Book. They are writing the number for the date and year, creating a pattern, forming their numbers using rhymes, learning about tally marks and ten frames and recording the weather. Small group workstations included "Listen and Count" count and object match activity, egg carton math, "Got It," "Spin a Number," using their number rhymes to write numbers 0-4 and basic shape recognition. Our Problem of the Day this week centered on positional words. Concepts above, below, next and under were included. Next week begins lessons in our new Eureka Math curriculum. A Parent Tip sheet is in your child's homework folder.
Social Studies/Emotional Growth: Our Second Step Lesson focused on how our Listening Rules help everyone learn. The puppet, Puppy, was super helpful!
Writing: The students are working on strengthening their hands and fingers by using clay. Kneading, squishing and rolling are great ways to get our fingers and hands moving. We continue to work on our tripod grasp when holding markers, crayons and pencils. Students are also using the giant tweezers (great tripod grasp tool) to "feed" the dog and to place colored beads into their matching cups. Next week we will spend some time trying some grasp strengthening activities from from a special finger training activity box. In Writer's Workshop this week, we continued our chat about writers writing what they know about. We discussed and recorded what writers can do, where writers can write and who in the class are writers? We also talked about what a sentence is--it is a group of words that NAMES and TELLS us about something or someone. Students added more details to existing writing pieces or began writing and drawing on a new topic of their choice. Some students have begun to use "inventive" or phonetic spelling. They are writing down what they hear. It may be the beginning sound or beginning and ending sound. It is what they are hearing that is important. Let them spell what they hear. During our writers conference time, students may read back to me what they wrote, ask me to help them write, show me their labeling of certain pictures or simply tell me about their drawing and I will record their responses.
Technology: We continue to work on foundational apps that are projected onto the screen for student interaction. We use the app Sound Sort focusing on beginning sounds. The app Fire Finger was used to set our numbers and uppercase letters on "fire." (recognition) Of course, Subitize Tree continues to aid in visual counting and finding number patterns. The app Weatherunderground, is used to familiarize students with current weather conditions in our area, temperature, precipitation and weather predictions.
Literature: "Chrysanthemum," "David Goes to School," "What Would the Fat Cat Sit On?" "If You Take a Mouse To School," "Mouse Loves School," "I Measure Myself," (poem) "The Mixed Up Alphabet."
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