Weekly News (Sept. 11-15)

I cannot believe we are already through are first three weeks of kindergarten! It's great to see the children adjusting to our classroom routines, making new friends, and getting excited about what we are learning. Take a peek below to see what we have been up to this week!

Math
This week we continued to explore the numbers 1 and 2 and began learning about the number 3. We practiced counting groups of 3 and writing the number 3. We also continued to explore the concept of same and different while we worked to make "matches" and identify attributes that were not the same when comparing objects. We also worked to sort objects using a single attribute such as size, shape, or color.

Jolly Phonics
The children are doing a great job learning our new letter sounds, including the three new sounds we learned this week:

/i/ as in "igloo"
/p/ as in "pig"
/n/ as in "noise"

They have been doing a great job learning our new sounds and coloring their Jolly Phonics pictures. We have been using these coloring opportunities as the students' first self-reflection experience using our coloring rubric. It's amazing to see how much pride the children take in their work when they are able to reflect on their progress and feel good about their work!

Click HERE to listen to the video for the letter I

Click HERE to listen to the video for the letter P

Click HERE to listen to the video for the letter N

Reading Workshop
The children also did a great job during our first reading workshop lessons of the year. During our first lesson, the children were introduced to all of the mentor texts that we will be using during our Launch Unit. We practiced "turning and talking" with our partners on our rainbow rug as we explored our collection of books. We also learned that good readers look closely at the cover of a book to predict what it might be about. Then we spent some time exploring books from bins at our tables and practiced looking closely at the cover of each book to help us make predictions.

LMC
The children listened to Chicka, Chicka Boom Boom during storytime in the LMC, and then they had their first computer experience in the LMC later in the week as they practiced navigating their way to our LMC homepage using our laptop computers. They also practiced using the track pad to drag and drop letters using an interactive game to go along with the book Chicka, Chicka Boom Boom!

Morning Class

Afternoon Class

Guest Reader

Next week will have our first student bring in their "Me Bag" to share with the class. As part of each student's "Me Week," a parent or family member can come into our classroom to share a story with the class on Friday. Our "Me Bag" schedule was sent home at Curriculum Night with your child's assigned week. If you have any questions or the date your child was assigned doesn't work for you, just let me know! This week it was Mrs. Riesing's week to share her "Me Bag" and her mom even came in to read a story to the class. They loved meeting "Suzy Squirrel!"

September 11th: National Day of Service and Remembrance

A big thank you to Mrs. Sessler and some of our 5th grade students for leading us as we sang "This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land" and the Dryden song as we remembered September 11th.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Click HERE to see more photos or use the link at the top of our blog!