Mrs. Hollenbeck granted us an extra recess which we took on Monday because it was such a beautiful day!
We have had two very busy weeks! In Phonics, we have moved into our study of our seventh letter and sound, Aa. That gives us two vowels and five consonants. We use letter tiles to spell out words with these letters every four days. The kids are beginning to use the Word Wall as a resource for spelling as well as for reminding themselves of our sight words.
The kids are also doing a great job with the spelling rules that they are learning thus far. They should be able to tell you that a vowel is "short with a breve" when it is "followed my a single consonant." They are also recognizing and sounding out consonant blends! We looked at blends with the letter S this past week, /sp/, /st/, /sk/, and /sm/. They can tell you that two consonants work together to make one sound. Please ask them about the words that they are reading and spelling on their Phonics worksheets. They are all working hard on the ability to segment and blend words. "Hog" is segmented into /h/ - /o/ - /t/. Ask you son or daughter to segment and then blend the words on his/her worksheet.
In a few days, the first Word List will be coming home with a letter explaining how to work with your son/daughter. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
In Language Arts, we have been identifying characters and what they say in stories. As they rotate around the Literacy Centers, the kids will listen to Yes, We Can! and then draw, label and identify their favorite character. As an extension, we are talking about what that particular character says during the story. In addition, some reading groups are looking at quotation marks and identifying the actual words a character says. We are also continuing to work on rhymes. After we read There's aWocket in My Pocket (Dr. Suess), the kids each wrote their own rhyme and illustrated a page of a class book. We have added several new sight words to our list as well. When we introduced "see," we read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle. The kids then wrote their own "I see a _____ " and "I can see a _____" sentences on white boards so that we could change the punctuation from a period, to a question mark to an exclamation point and explore how that changed the sentences.
Here are a few shots from our latest Literacy Centers. We are matching letters, reading and illustrating a new poem, matching rhyming words and sorting beginning sounds.
Writing provided an opportunity to do some interdisciplinary work this week. The kids used our talk of apples (more on that later), the sight work "like," and their use of periods to write sentences explaining their favorite way to eat apples.
The exploration of our Five Senses in Science has been a lot of fun. I'm sure that you saw our recording sheets for the items we smelled, touched, heard and tasted. We were lucky to have one of our classmates bring us each a shell that she found at the beach and what perfect timing it was to explore those shells using our senses! :)
We FINALLY got to use our sense of TASTE :) The kids really enjoyed all of the apples... I was surprised about the Granny Smith ones! I think one child threw away one apple slice... everyone else ate red, green and yellow and most of them asked for more. We had enough red apples to finish them up the next day.
In Math, we are exploring the standard that requires students to identify whether the number of objects in one group is greater than, less than, or equal to the number of objects in another group.
We are doing this by
using matching and counting strategies. The kids are practicing comparing numbers with concrete sets, pictorial representations as well as abstract representations (the numerals). I am continually asking them WHY when they explain their thoughts about comparing numbers. This ability to explain their thinking is a very important skill to develop, not just in math, but across all subject areas. They are really letting me push them and are coming up with amazing explanations.
Earlier in the week, we played "Compare," similar to "War," and the kids had a lot of fun winning those cards from their partners!
Mrs. Rudakevych, a FCPS Primary Talent Development Teacher, came for a lesson this week. The kids enjoyed her memory exercise. They were to try to remember their classmates' names and favorite colors as we rolled the ball around the circle. One of our Kinders remembered NINE favorite colors. Pretty impressive!
