Ms. Concannon's Kindergarten: Goodbye August, Hello September

A look at our learning this week...

Fundations: we learned the name, sound and correct letter formation for the lowercase letters t, f, b. Use the following prompts at home to help your child form their letters correctly:

t-down, across (we don't add the tail)

f-over, down, across

b-down, up around.

Check your child's Friday Folder for next week's letters and how to continue their learning at home.

Shared Reading: we read two poems this week: "Hello Class" and "Beginning on Paper." Both are poems about our names and continue to help us learn our friends names. Ask your child's to recite the poems to you, many have them memorized.

During Shared Reading I am modeling how readers point to the words when they read and keep their eyes on the words that we are pointing to. They are practicing by following along with my pointer and tracking the words with their eyes.

Daily 5 workstations: this week we began Daily 5 workstations. This is a time when students will rotate through centers with a partner. I like to call them workstations, rather than centers, because it reinforces that they are working and learning and not just playing. During this time they will work on literacy activities to reinforce reading and writing skills learned in the classroom. Right now the workstations are pretty simple: building letters with pattern blocks, playing Starfall on the computer, tracing our friends names on whiteboards, matching our friends names to their picture at pocketchart, etc. but they will get more difficult as the year goes on and tie in with our daily learning.

We had two goals this week at Daily 5 time:

1) Stay at your workstation

2) Use a whisper voice

Ask your child what Daily 5 workstation they went to this week.

We will eventually work our way up to going to 2-3 Daily 5 workstations a day. Once routines are in place and the children can work independently I will start pulling reading groups and teaching the students how to read during this time. My goal is typically to start teaching reading groups in October. It takes us until then in Kindergarten to make sure the children can work at their workstations without my support and help, that way I can teach reading groups uninterrupted.

Math: we continued to work on counting and numbers this week, but also spent several days talking about our birthdays, which is math! We now have a birthday board in our room that shows when every child's birthday is. We talked about what month has the most birthdays, the least, who the oldest/youngest is, etc.
Check your child's Friday Folder for math worksheets you can do as a family to help extend the learning at home.

Writing Workshop: before we get into real writing, we focus on drawing the pictures. Pictures are such an important part of a story! Many children come to Kindergarten drawing stick people or spider people (you know, the circle for the head and stick arms and legs coming out of the head 😊). This week we learned how to draw people with basic shapes: triangles, circles, rectangles, etc. We also learned how to add a setting to our picture and to make sure our characters are "grounded" in our story and not floating in space. This means we need to add grass or a floor or something under our feet when drawing and not just draw in the middle of the paper. This also means we add detail behind our main character: sun, flowers, house, pets, etc.

Ask your child to show you their writing journal they are bringing home today with their drawings in it!

Kindness: one big thing we are working on in our classroom is kindness, especially with tone of voice when speaking to our friends. We are working on not using sharp tones or whiny tones with our friends. We are learning to use phrases such as: "Can you please move out of my line spot?" or "Can I please use that toy?" or "I had that toy first" and things like that. When I notice them using unkind tones we stop and try it again in a different way. Any help at home with this would be greatly appreciated!

Check out our new Wobble Chairs!

Thanks to Donors Choose and everyone who donated!

We are excited to use them to help us focus and be the best learners we can be!