Hello! Hard to believe it's been a month since the last Blogpost... my apologies!!
We have been busy, busy, busy in K!! It's been amazing to listen to the kids counting by 10s and 5s to 100 without the songs we sing daily as well as to see all of the growth the students are making with the letter identification of uppercase, lowercase, and sounds! Remember, it is our goal to have ALL students know ALL letters and sounds by mid-December! This will help lay the foundation for our young readers to actually get reading real books! SO many proud teacher moments in the last couple of weeks. We also had our "Buster the Bus" safety assembly and got to practice going on a bus and evacuating out the back of the bus into Mrs. Weckstein's arms! In addition to a TON of practice for our "Fall is Here" concert... which they totally ROCKED!!
Phonics:
In Phonics UFLI we have been busy mastering letter sounds with proper lip/tongue formation as well as our letter formation. I'll be giving parents a paper at conferences that explains how we do our letter formation (top to bottom, left to right ;-). In our Phonics with Calkins we have been learning to transfer our knowledge of letter sounds to making and creating words! We have been labeling popular areas of our classrooms with stickie notes using this inventive spelling, we have been working on noticing spaces between words and even have tackled our first few "snap" words.
Our SNAP word list will grow all year, but here's what we 'own' so far: I, like, my, the, said
Readers' Workshop:
In Readers' Workshop we have become "Super" Readers! We are working on mastering all the good skills that readers do: We can point to each word one by one as we read them, we can make our voices sound like the characters, we can read the 'exact' words and we know the parts of a book (front cover, back cover and the title). Each child gets SNAP word books each week that they have been keeping in their book bins and have mostly memorized. These work SO well to get the feel of a reader! Guided reading groups have also been going in motion for a few weeks now and the kids are getting the routines down of working with me in a small group while others are learning to work independently so I can work with small groups!
Writers' Workshop:
We are approaching the end of our first unit in Writers' Workshop! It's wild to see how much growth our writers' have made from September to November! Writers' are learning to label their illustrations with a single letter or even multiple sounds from a word. Brave writers are even going further by using those SNAP words from above to write their own sentences! I'll be hanging on to the writing from this unit to show you at conferences and then the writing will come home for you to celebrate with your Weckie!
Math Workshop:
Numbers, numbers and more numbers!! We have been counting EVERYTHING lately!! Counting the days of school, counting the number of students in line, counting the number of kids at each table, etc.. We are really getting good at counting! We are counting by 1s, 5s, and 10s in our classroom. We have been working on doing "Quick Looks" where we count the dots shown quickly on a card on the screen without actually counting them! As we get more comfortable with 5 and 10-frames, we learn how to use clues on the frame to give us a number automatically. For instance if it's showing a 5 frame, and there is one empty box, we know the number is one less than five, or four dots, without actually counting the dots. We have also done some activities where we started with a group of objects, 5 or 10 of them, and put some in a pocket. Then the kids have to figure out based on how many objects they can see, how many MORE must be in the pocket! Thank you to EVERYONE who sent in magazines for our shapes posters! They turned out great and we got a lot of practice finding circles, squares, triangles and rectangles in real life photos!
Social Studies:
In Social Studies we are just about to wrap up our first unit on Rules and Laws. We have been talking at great length about the importance of following rules to help keep us safe and happy. We have talked about rules at home compared to rules at school, or rules in the classroom compared to rules on the playground. We have talked about our Dublin Promise and how following our Dublin Promise can encompass ALL of the rules we'd ever have in our classroom ("I am a Dublin Shamrock. Every day I am safe, respectful, responsible, act with integrity, am resilient...")
Upcoming Important Dates:
*Tuesday, November 3rd - No School - Election Day
*Wednesday, November 4th - Field Trip forms and money due
*Thursday, November 12th - 1/2 day + 1 hour earlier dismissal - Parent-Teacher Conferences
*Wednesday, November 25 - 1/2 day of school
*Thursday, November 26-27th - No School - Thanksgiving Break
More fun pics...
