Happy Fall!

 A look at our learning...

Fundations: this week we learned the name, sound and correct letter formation for lowercase i and u.  We learned that these two letters are vowels and the other letters we've learned so far are consonants (t, b, f, n, m).

Please use the following verbal prompts when practicing letter formation at home, especially if your child has these letters in their name:

i-down, dot (the dot should be just that, a dot.  Not a circle or scribble)

u-down, curve up, down (make sure they are doing the final "down" part, as many forget it.  There should be a "stick" at the end of the letter if they are following these verbal prompts.)

Heggerty: you may hear your child talking about Heggerty time and thinking "what in the world is Heggerty?" Heggerty is a phonemic awareness program that works on rhyme, beginning/ending sounds, blending and segmenting words, adding and deleting phonemes and substituting phonemes.  Daily Heggerty lessons will help your child learn how to read, write and spell as they hear sounds in words.  

Writing Workshop: we are working on "3 Star Coloring."  This means we 1) stay in the lines 2) use colors that make sense 3) fill in the white space.  In Kindergarten we take our time, do our best and don't scribble. 

We continue to work on drawing people using shapes, not sticks, adding detail to our people and a background/setting to our pictures.  Pictures ARE stories at this point in the year.  Before a child can WRITE a story with words, they must be able to DRAW and tell a story VERBALLY.  Soon we will move to labeling our pictures with beginning sounds or words.

Math: this week we continued to work on counting/numbers to 10, learned what a 5 frame is and how it can help us count and show numbers in a variety of ways, explored shapes and described attributes of shapes.  Check your child's Friday Folder for ways to extend their learning from this week at home. 

Science: we began our living and non-living science unit.  We are learning that living things need air, sun, food, water and space.  We had fun celebrating the first few days of Fall by going on a Fall Nature Walk and making a Friday Fall Craft that connected science and writing. We also read several Fall related books this week.

Handwashing: learning proper handwashing in Kindergarten is a big deal.  We want to keep our friends healthy and at school.  Kids this age often wash too quickly, without scrubbing.  To help everyone stay healthy at school, I encourage you to reinforce proper handwashing at home.

1) wet hands (soap "doesn't work" unless hands are wet first)

2) ONE squirt of soap.  Scrub hands, with water off so they aren't tempted to wash it off, while singing the ABC song.  Make sure to get all sides of the hands, between fingers and around the wrists

3) wash off with warm water

4) dry

I know it seems silly, but it takes a lot of practice.  I appreciate your help at home.  Check out these expert handwashers!

Recess: we are phasing out our extra morning recess.  K-5 has two recesses a day, but for the first 4-6 weeks of Kindergarten we take an extra recess as they ease into the school routine.  This third recess was 20 minutes long in the morning, but it went down to 10 minutes this week and will be 10 minutes next week during our final week.  Beginning October 4th we will just have two recesses like grades 1-5 (lunch and afternoon).  This will allow us to spend more time on academics.  We will still take wiggle breaks in the classroom, as needed, by dancing, exercising, GoNoodle or Cosmic Kids Yoga.