Ms. Concannon's Kindergarten: Welcome back!

Welcome back!

I hope you had an enjoyable winter break and holiday season with your family!

A look at our learning this week...

Fundations: as we have returned from winter break, I really noticed the students struggling with "tapping out" 3 letter words and blending them together to say the word. To help support their learning in the classroom, I really encourage you to refer to the parent handout this weekend and throughout next week and practice at home. Make it a nightly routine to do the activities. Should only take 5 minutes or so. Learning how to tap out words is fundamental in helping them learn how to read and write. Hopefully with some extra reinforcement at home, we can get back in the groove.

Shared Reading: this week we read the big book What I like. We worked on pointing to words when we read, quickly identifying and reading any word wall words that are in the book and looking at the picture to help us solve unknown words. Each child added a copy of this book to their book box to read during "Read to Self" time.

I mention "Shared Reading" every week, so you may be wondering what it is. "Shared Reading is an interactive reading experience that occurs when students join in or share the reading of a book or text while guided and supported by the teacher. The teacher explicitly models the skills of proficient readers, including reading with fluency and expression." (source: Reading Rockets)

A big book is an enlarged book that all students can see. We work on the same 1 or 2 big books all week and once the students are "experts" at reading the book, they get a smaller copy to keep in their book box to read independently.

In the pictures below, students are highlighting word wall words in their smaller copies of our big book mentioned above.

Spelling words: beginning next week, we will learn TWO new spelling words a week, rather than one. Please make sure you are practicing with your child daily. Reading and writing the words. I will begin posting the new words every Friday in the blog in case you want to get a head start with practicing over the weekend. The words will still be introduced to the students on Monday's. Every Friday, the most up to date word wall list comes home in their Take Home Folder.

Next week's new spelling words:

see

Writing Workshop: this week we worked on a special writing activity called "Winter Break in a snap." Each day we had a share time where we shared about our winter break and recorded our sharing on this paper. You will see it in your child's take home folder tonight!

Next week, we will switch from writing personal narratives (stories about our lives) to opinion writing.

Math: this week we worked on being flexible thinkers by making shapes in multiple ways and making numbers in multiple ways. On Wednesday and Thursday they brought home the work that they did in their take home folders. We are also learning about weight and capacity. Check your child's Friday Folder for ways to extend their math learning at home.