A look at our learning...
Fundations: our focus has been building sentences. I will say a short sentence, such as: "The cat is on the mat." and they will have to say the sentence, count the words and help me write it. If a word isn't a word wall word, they have to tap it out to tell me how to spell it. We also make sure we begin with an uppercase letter and end with punctuation. Once our sentence is built, we practice reading it fluently.
We are also working on saying the "th" sound correctly. Watch your child's mouth when they make this sound. Do they have their tongue between their teeth? If so, they are saying it correctly. Are they biting their lip? If so, that is the /f/ sound and they need to work on making this sound correctly. A great way to see if they are using this diagraph correctly is listening when they count and get to the 30's and 40's. Many say "firty" instead of "thirty" and we want to work on correcting this.
Check the Friday Folder for your parent packet and ways to help build and read sentences fluently at home.
Shared Reading: this week we read the books Tools and These or Those? to help us with our new spelling words. The kiddos are really becoming great readers and reading longer books with more words on each page! We are working on being problem solvers when we come to an unknown word and NOT skipping the word. We can look at the picture, tap it out and think about what makes sense to help us solve it, but we DO NOT skip it.
Next week's spelling words
of
have
Writing Workshop: we finished up our narrative writing unit this week. I have really enjoyed their spring break stories and Easter stories. During the next few weeks we will work on a Kindergarten memory book that they will bring home near the end of the year and a few other special end of year writing projects. We will continue to focus on their individual writing goals at this time as well. I've included those below as a reminder for you to focus on at home as well. No ones has changed yet as it takes time to show we are experts.
Math: we explored calculators again (which they love), but this time we focused on using the calculator to help us solve simple addition problems. We also used a balance to talk about capacity. We filled one side with water and used objects from the classroom to fill the other side and discussed what we needed to do for it to be equal on both sides. We also took some surveys and represented our data.
Soon I will be assessing end of Kindergarten math objectives.
Can your child do the following?
*Count to 100 by ones and tens
*Count a set number of objects, up to 10, with one to one match
*Count backwards from 10
*Count on from a given number that IS NOT 1
*Identify the following shapes: triangle, square, rectangle, circle, hexagon, trapezoid, rhombus, cylinder, sphere, cube, cone, pyramid
*Write numbers 0-20
*Identify numbers 0-20
*Add and subtract numbers to 10
These are all end of Kindergarten goals and things we have been working on throughout the year.
Fast Pass Award: at Monday Morning Meeting it was announced that our class won the "Fast Pass" Award for grades K-2. This means the lunch and recess supervisors thought our class did the best job of eating, cleaning up and playing safely at recess. As a reward, we were able to leave the cafeteria first to go to recess and we were able to keep a Flash the Timberwolf stuffed animal in our room all week!
April Citizen of the Month: Kaylee was chosen, by her peers, as April Citizen of the Month! Congratulations Kaylee!
Special visitor: On Thursday, Monica Naylor visited with Kindergarten. Monica is Beulah Ralph's daughter and she loves to visit every year to teach us about her mother and our schools namesake. We are blessed to have our school named after such a wonderful person. Your child brought home a story that Monica read to us about her mother as a child. Have your child tell you about it!
Administrative Professionals Day: we celebrated our wonderful administrative assistants on Wednesday. We are so lucky to have Mrs. Lambert, Ms. Grace, Mrs. Stokes and Mr. Cameron at BEU.
May Day: on Friday we celebrated May Day. This was one of my favorite days when I was a child. I grew up in a small town and we would walk, as a class, around town delivering homemade May Day baskets to people in town. I always loved delivering one to my great grandma who lived close to my school. I have continued this tradition now that I am a teacher and have shared this day with my students every year for my 18 years of teaching. It is such a wonderful way to teach about spreading kindness and doing something out of the goodness of your own heart. We hope all the classrooms or faculty who received one were as excited about receiving one as we were delivering them! I love how it teaches that the feeling of kindness is the true gift and we don't do it to receive something on our end. Never heard of May Day? Learn more here.
A to Z Countdown to Summer: we are having so much fun with our countdown to summer! We especially loved having a surprise visit from Flash the Timberwolf, our school mascot, on F Day!
I have posted a few pictures of our fun here, but more are on our class Facebook page! This week we celebrated letters C-G.
