Happy Dot Day!

A full moon AND Friday the 13th?? Oh my!  Thankfully we survived our day and week!

We had another phenomenal turnout at our annual Kindergarten families picnic.  It was hot and humid, but thankfully the rain held of. I love this tradition that brings us all together and I hope you did too.  It is so nice to meet new people, share yummy foods and see your children interact at their home away from home! Thanks to everyone who came and brought a yummy dish or two to share!

A look at our learning this week...

Fundations: this week we learned the name, sound and correct letter formation for lowercase u and i.  We learned these letters are special letters called vowels.  They are also plane line letters, meaning they start on the plane line on our handwriting paper.

Please use the following verbal prompts when helping your child form these letters:

u: down, curve up, down

i: down, dot (not scribble or a big circle)

So far this year we have learned the following lowercase letters, sounds and letter formation: t, b, f, n, m, u, i.  Your child should be experts at identifying these letters and their sounds.  If this is difficult for your child, I'd recommend practicing them at home using the Fundations activities that come home in the Friday Folders.  You could also make your own flash cards and each night go through them and have your child tell you their name and sound.  If you'd ever like extra handwriting pages to practice at home, just let me know.  I'd happily send some home.  I put a copy of lowercase u and i in the folder again this week.  If your child would like to practice and bring it to school on Monday to show me, they are welcome to.  Thanks to everyone who helped their child practice n and m last weekend.  It greatly helped! 

Shared Reading: Shared Reading is an interactive reading process in which the teacher and students share in reading a poem or book and the teacher models the skills to be a proficient reader.  This week we read the poem "Friends."  I modeled how when we read we point to the words with our finger or with a special pointer.  I move my finger or pointer when I am reading a new word.  We also talked about how we can be a good friend to everyone in our class.  We made a promise to be a caring friend who shares, all year long.  We then signed our name on the poem to show we can keep our promise.  This poem will be displayed in our classroom this year.  They also got their own copy of the poem to keep in their special poetry folder.  The poetry folder will be filled with many poems we learn this year.

Brooklyn modeling how to point to words when we read.

Writing Workshop: we are getting better at learning how to draw people.  Check out the chart below to see the different shapes, skin colors, hairstyles and faces/feelings we can use when drawing people. The kiddos are getting better at not drawing stick or "spider" people and making their work look more realistic.  

This week we also learned that stories/writings have a background or a setting where the story takes place.  We used special "character cards" and had to create a setting in our writing tablets to go with the character card we chose.  Check out these amazing drawings!

Math:  this week we have continued to work on counting, our birthday, we made a graph of who is 5 and who is 6 years old in our class and we get to move our picture on the graph when we turn 6, learned what a 5 frame is and how it helps us count, learned what a quick image is and how it helps us count and see numbers in different ways and worked more on ST math!  Wow, that's a lot!  Check your child's Friday Folder for more fun ways to work on math at home to support our learning in the classroom. 

If you are trying to access ST math at home so your child can review the levels they did in the classroom, there is one little tweak to the directions I sent home last week.  You must first go to www.cpsk12.org and log on to the CPS portal using your child's username and password.  Their username and password is the one I sent home on the keyboard paper last week for you to practice with them.  Once you are logged onto the portal, you should be able to click on the ST math icon and this will bypass their ST math picture password.  Please remember, they will only be doing review levels of ST math and not new levels at home. 

Dot Day: today our school celebrated Dot Day.  To learn more about this fun day, click here
We read the book and created our own masterpieces. They are drying and will come home next week.

Play time is the best time!