I would like to express my gratitude for the treats, supplies and assistance we received from our homeroom parents to make our Valentine’s Day party and our 100th Day Celebration so successful. Our students enjoyed a week of meaningful festivities and were very excited to celebrate and acknowledge the 100th day of school in so many ways. And of course, they loved the goody bags! Thank you for your support with these endeavors!

 

Morning Meeting: We are using different greetings to enhance social skills and the children are sharing about different topics in their lives each day. After Calendar routines, we have been working on activities with sight words, syllables, and phonemic awareness. I have seen wonderful progress in these areas! We focused on the Character Strong trait of Honesty and how we can be honest in our words and actions in our lives at school and home.

 

Sound Work: Now that we know all lowercase and uppercase letters of the alphabet, we are spelling and writing CVC words ourselves, identifying beginning, middle and final sounds in words, learning about digraphs, creating rhyming families, and practicing our letter formation.   We are continuing to learn one-two sight/trick words per week and have created books using these words. We are listening to and writing sentences, and we now know to use a beginning uppercase letter, spaces, and periods in each sentence we write.

 

Writing: After writing many pattern books about favorite and creative topics and subtopics,we are writing personal narratives about small, special moments in our lives with a clear beginning, middle and end. We learned how to add details to our pictures and ideas so that our readers can better understand our writing. We are growing in our ability and perseverance to tap out our own words and use capitalization and punctuation more independently. 

 

Reading: This month focused on building fluency by using the reading print strategies of using the beginning and end letters of words, reading the parts/syllables of words, skating through words, rhyming word families, sentence patterns, and using the pictures to confirm our thinking in our just-right books. We practice reading to ourselves with our weekly sight word booklets and just-right books in our book bins, and we have used Raz-Kids to further enjoy our reading experiences. I continue to meet with my students in guided reading groups at their reading levels as they blossom into independent readers.

 

Math: We practiced identifying, writing and ordering numbers 1-100 as we approached our 100th day of school. We discovered how to count, add and subtract manipulatives through number stories and roleplay. We then learned how to add and subtract through manipulatives, modeling, and acting out number stories, and we learned how to write equations with proper symbols. We have played games, used manipulatives and sang songs/raps to learn in math. We are now counting by 2s to 20 and 5s and 10s to 100 by singing Macarena Math; we get faster each day!

 

SS & Science:

We used our observations as scientists and learned about the life cycle of seeds and plants. We planted grass in cups and then planted lima beans and grass to watch the life cycle take place before our eyes!We have observed plants and animals in our school backyard, and we discovered the needs of plants and animals through observation, inquiry, experiments, books and videos.  

 

It is a joy to teach your children every day! I look forward to the adventures that lie ahead for us this year! Thank you for your continued cooperation and support in making kindergarten a smooth and magical experience for your child!