Ms. Concannon's Kindergarten: January Citizen of the Month

A look at our learning over the past two weeks...

Fundations: we have begun Unit 3, which will mainly focus on learning to "tap out" 3-4 letter words quickly when reading and writing. We will also begin learning "trick words." Trick words are words that can't be "tapped out" and are words we have to "just know" or memorize. They are important words as they are ones that will show up often in books as they are becoming readers. In your Fundations parent pack are "trick word" flash cards. I encourage you to cut these out and place in a baggie to practice often. I have included these words in our spelling words for the rest of the year. Meaning, when it is the week in Fundations for us to learn a particular "trick word," I will make sure it is also one of our new spelling words this week. That way you aren't practicing additional words. That being said, you do not have to wait until that week to start practicing the other words with your child! The more you practice, the better they get!

Please check your child's Take Home Folder for their end of Unit 2 assessment to see what areas they did well on and if there are any areas you may need to practice at home.

Shared Reading: we read the big books Too little, Too big and Go In. Both books featured our new spelling words of the week. They were able to add small copies of these books to their book boxes to practice reading during Read to Self time.

Below, they are highlighting spelling words they notice in the book. Noticing "known words" in text is an important skill when reading.

Next week's new spelling words:

can

Daily 5 workstations: we have several new workstations that focus on "tapping out" 3-4 letter words. This ties into our Fundations lessons and is more practice to help us become better readers and writers. Pocketchart is one of these new workstations. Check out how hard these girls worked to "tap out," read and match every word with it's picture!

Writing Workshop: after a couple of weeks of really learning what an opinion is through stories, fact vs. opinion sorts and verbally sharing our opinions and supporting reasons why, we began writing opinion pieces over the past two weeks.

We are starting with papers that begin the sentence for us and we fill in our opinion and reason's why. As you can see below, this writing assignment was "The best pet and why." As we get better with this we will move to writing every word by ourselves without a sentence starter. Really working on "tapping out" words, like mentioned at Fundations, and practicing and knowing their spelling words will help them be more successful as writers. They all tie in together.

We also continue to work on putting spaces between our words so it is easy to read. This week I taught them about the "two finger word space." They simply hold up two fingers and after they write a word, they put their two fingers on the paper to leave a proper amount of space between the word they just wrote and the next one.

Ask your child to show you how to do a two finger word space.

Math: we are beginning Unit 5 in math. Please check your child's Friday Folder for what we will learn in the upcoming unit and how you can support their learning at home.

A few things to see if your child can do:

*Count to at least 60 by 1's and 10's

*Identify the following shapes: circle, square, triangle, rectangle, trapezoid, hexagon, rhombus

*Identify at least 15 numbers from 0-20

*Count backwards from 10

*Write their numbers to at least 15

All of those will be items assessed and reported on for the 2nd trimester report cards in 3-4 weeks. We practice at school, but if you notice your child can't do these things, extra practice is encouraged at home.

Science: we had a super fun day in Kindergarten on Thursday! We spent the entire day rotating through all six Kindergarten classrooms going to science stations for our "Force and Motion: Pushes and Pulls" unit.

Some key things your child learned about:

*Force

*Motion

*Pushes

*Pulls

*Friction

*Gravity

Ask your child to tell you about what they did/learned in each classroom that day! You can use the pictures below and on our class Facebook page to guide their conversation. We don't have pictures from every classroom, but they still should be able to tell you about it. We have a lot of pictures, so I will post a few here and the rest on Facebook.

Friday Craft: the kiddos have been obsessed with SNOW lately, so we read several books about snow and made a craft that shared what we love to do in the winter. A few books we read: Winter is Here by Kevin Henkes, Snow by Cynthia Rylant and Snow Day! by Lester L. Laminack.