Ms. Concannon's Kindergarten: Goodbye February, Hello March

Whew! February was a blur! Between holidays, birthdays (lots and lots of birthdays), snow days and everything in between, it was crazy! I will be ready for routine and structure during the month of March! This week was used to catch up on lessons from the hectic last two weeks. I enjoyed meeting with all of you this week during parent-teacher conferences!

A look at our learning...

Fundations: as I mentioned to most of you during conferences, we are really working on "tapping out" (sounding out) 3 letter words. Your children know their letter names and sounds and now it's time to really apply that to our reading and writing. They are often really good at tapping out each individual sound, but sometimes have a more difficult time blending the sounds together to read the word. The more they practice, the more natural this will become and you will begin to see their reading and writing skills improve. I strongly encourage you to refer to the Fundations parent packets that come home every Friday and do the suggested activities throughout the week. From here on out, it will typically be a list of words for them to tap out and read to you and tap out and spell on paper for you.

Spelling Words: the kiddos are doing great on their weekly spell check. I continue to remind them that it is ok if they miss a word, no one will be upset, it just tells us that we need to practice that one more at home and school! Everyone makes mistakes, it's how we learn!

Next weeks spelling words:

are

love

Math: we will continue to work on those tricky teen numbers! It is typical, and I see it every year, for kiddos to have trouble with the teens. It will come in time and I promise they will know them by the end of Kindergarten.

This week, we had a lot of fun learning about balancing, weight and capacity! We used equal arm balances and objects from around the classroom to learn about how some things weigh more than others, how to know if weight is equal and that even though something might be bigger/smaller in size, that doesn't always mean it weighs the most/least! You can check their Seesaw for some of their work as well.

Social Studies: thank you for filling out the google survey about your families. Over the next few weeks, we will be learning about families, traditions, similarities and differences. I look forward to getting to know more about your kiddos and your families!

Writing Workshop: as mentioned above with Fundations, we are really working on making our writing legible. This means, spelling our word wall words correctly at all times and "tapping out" or sounding out unknown words. We are working on writing the sounds we hear to form a word and not just writing down random letters. They know their sounds, so it's time to see that in their writing. They work hard every day at writing and I hope you enjoyed seeing the progress they have made in their writing with the work they brought home in their take home folder on Friday. If you haven't checked their take home folder yet, please do so as it is very full. Ask them to read a couple pieces of their writing to you. Let them see how proud you are of their hard work! We will clean out writing folders like this every so often.

Special visitor: on Tuesday we had a special visitor, Monica Naylor, who is Beulah Ralph's daughter. She has visited the Kindergarten classrooms at Beulah Ralph ever since our school opened. She likes to tell them a story about when her mother was younger. This year our visit was on Zoom. A copy of the story she read came home with your child on Tuesday. I hope you enjoyed talking with your child about our schools namesake. She was a truly special lady and we are lucky to attend a school named in her honor.

100th day of school: we had so much fun sharing our 100th day collections this week! It is neat to see how 100 can look so different! We are excited to celebrate our 100th day of school on Thursday! (technically it's Wednesday, but we are celebrating when in-seat on Thursday). Don't forget, we are dressing up on that day as if we are 100 years old! I can't wait to see their outfits!