Ms. Concannon's Kindergarten: Back to our regularly scheduled programming....kind of!

After a crazy couple of weeks with snow days, cold days, ice days, late starts and a teacher being chosen for jury duty for the first time ever, we are kind of back to a regular schedule and boy does it feel good! While I love a good snow day (or two or three) I also love routine!

A look at our learning...

Fundations: Your child has now learned how to form ALL uppercase and lowercase letters correctly. While I do see them forming their letters correctly, for the most part, when we explicitly work on it during Fundations time, I do notice many struggling to carry the correct formation over into their daily writing. I continue to encourage you to hold them accountable for forming their letters neatly and correctly at all times. The more we perfect it now, the more successful they will be as writers as they go to first grade and beyond. The less they have to think about how to form their letters, the more they can focus on the craft of writing.

Don't know where to start to hold them accountable for their learning? Their name is a great place to start! Do they rush and just slop their name down on paper? If so, have them erase and tell them to slow down and form their letters correctly. Then expand beyond that to spelling words, etc.

Please refer to the Fundations parent packet in the Friday Folder. I encourage you to use the ideas for handwriting and tapping out words at home throughout the week.

Writing Workshop: since returning from winter break, we have been using new writing paper with more lines and is two sided! The lines are Fundations lines, rather than the single line paper we had been using. This is a natural progression now that we have learned how to correctly form all letters in Fundations and their gross motor skills are developing and ready for a more traditional style of writing paper. This new paper will also help to reinforce forming their letters correctly at all times, not just during explicit practice in Fundations.

This new paper also helps us to add more detail to our stories. We are working on writing more than one sentence. The long term goal is to eventually write 2-3 sentences to tell a story.

Adding more detail is something that will take some time and we will work on for quite awhile, so please know that if this is tricky for your child at the moment, that is more than ok and expected.

Check out a couple of our classmates stories from this week on our new paper. They did a great job writing on the lines and telling more. Also, check out those word wall words spelled correctly and phonetic spelling on the rest!

I was playing with my cat. My cat loved it.

Me and my family play with my toys. It was fun.

Shared Reading & Spelling: this week we read the big book For Mom and the poem Love is... to practice our new spelling words. Something we are working on is NOT capitalizing the m on mom and d on dad. We have discussed how those are terms we call our parents, but not their names, so they need to start each word with a lowercase letter. Watch for this at home.

Next week's new spelling words

yes

Daily 5 Workstations/Guided Reading: Guided Reading groups are in full swing for all students! While students are working independently at their literacy workstations each day, I work with small groups of students in guided reading groups. These groups are based on student ability and we work on reading strategies and read books that are appropriate for those specific children in that group. Many groups are focusing on pointing to the words when they read and learning multiple reading strategies to try when they come to an unknown word, rather than appealing to an adult.

Check out some of our readers below. You will notice the red card in one picture. This is a resource we are using to help us use our reading strategies. 9 times out of 10, if they try these strategies they won't need adult help. The strategies we are working on at the moment: 1) Look at the picture 2) Get your mouth ready for the first sound in the word 3) Say the word slowly (tap it out, sound it out) 4) Reread to see what might make sense.

When reading group time is over each day, these books go in their book boxes and are there for them to read during Read to Self time each day. Rereading familiar texts is key in becoming a fluent reader.

Math: they had a lot of fun learning about a pan balance, weighing different objects on the pan balance to see what objects were heavier, lighter or the same, using rice and various cups, bowls and containers to learn about capacity, the penny and the dime and making numbers in various ways. We've also had fun sharing our 100th day collections. If your child hasn't turned theirs in, no worries! They have until Friday, February 9th. This is the 99th day of school and we want them all turned in before the 100th day.

Counselor: this week we learned about keeping small problems small and not letting them turn into big problems and how it's not always what we say, but how we say it or how we handle a problem that makes the situation better or worse.