Friday, November 13th

 Hello Weckie Fams! In the month of November we often take time to think of all we are thankful and grateful for... Well I have to tell you just how thankful and grateful I am for your children!! They are such special people and I love spending my time with each of them everyday! Honestly, just remember to wear eye make up and EVERY girl will tell you how beautiful you look that day ;-). It was wonderful to speak to each of you at Parent-Teacher Conferences and share so many success stories of growth in independent skills, letter identification, sounds, counting, handwriting, social skills and more! These kids are blossoming and I am so grateful to each of you for sharing them with me each day!

This is our school promise that we recite and use daily!

Phonics

In Phonics we have wrapped up Unit 1 of our Lucy Calkins units of study and moved into Unit 2 which is all about being "Word Detectives". We have spent time this week looking at ABC charts and will be bringing one home in the coming days to keep at home to use to help us remember letter ID for both upper and lowercase letters as well as letter sounds. I would laminate or stick this page in a glossy sheet and keep it in a special place so they can use it to help them with their reading and writing at home. 

In our UFLI work we spent last week learning about CVC and VC words (Consonant+Vowel+Consonant and Vowel+Consonent words). For example words like: at, mat, sap, etc.. We spent time using our new magnetic letters and trays making different word chains. On Friday (November 13) I will be sending home the Lesson 5 and Lesson 6 "Home Practice" pages for UFLI. You can use these little home activities to further reinforce our work at school.

The home practice sheet will show you:

1. New concept and Sample Words (In lesson 5 that was reviewing the letters: a, m, s and t - and then using those letters/sounds to make words like at, sat and mat)

2. Our new irregular word we practiced spelling and learning about was: and

3. With magnetic letters or whiteboards you can practice making: at, then turning it into sat, and changing that once more into mat (simply by adjusting the beginning sound) 

4. Then lastly, you can practice reading a sentence using all of the work we have just done!

These will continue to come home after each lesson is completed so you can follow along at home and get in some extra practice if you can too!

Finally, our phonics SNAP word list now includes: and, my, it, like, the, said, look, at, see

 

Readers' Workshop:

We have now begun our second unit of study called: Sharing Reading in Readers' Workshop! To begin this unit we sent home all of our favorite books from home and learned how to book shop in our classroom library for books that are JUST RIGHT for our young readers! In addition to SNAP word books in our bins, we know have just right books for us... YAY!!  Each kiddo keeps about 6-8 books in their bin each week and can trade them or keep them for new books at the beginning of the week. Reading groups continue to meet and the small group work has been fantastic! We play with magnetic letters to get going - either spelling our names a few times or matching uppercase to lowercase magnets. We have been doing sorts of pictures beginning with different sounds to practice our sound awareness and then we get reading!

Our new chart in workshop will teach us different skills we can use to read new books! The first skill we learned was about 1:1 matching and making sure that we use our pointer to tap each word that we read, one-by-one! Next we talked about taking a sneak peek when first opening up a new book (looking at the pictures and thinking what the book might be about, before we even try to read the book). 

This is such a fun unit as we really start to see our kids learning to read!!! Be patient, it takes time, but it is really rewarding too!!

Writers' Workshop:

We wrapped up our first unit of study and will be bringing allllll of our writing home next week! We are storybook writers! Each child will have several writing pieces to bring home and please take time to look through them all with them. You should also be starting to notice a progression from simple drawings/designs to more detailed drawings, the appearance of letters/labels and maybe even some words!

Math Workshop:

In Math we have continued: exploring with shapes, counting objects in a group (and learning strategies for not getting confused when we do this), counting to 100 by 1s, 5s, and 10s, learning to write our numbers on a whiteboard up to 20 and playing with patterns! We'll be bringing our Unit 2 Math workbooks home in the next week as well as we are just about done with them!

Social Studies:

This past week we finished up our first unit on rules and laws. For the formative assessment, each child had to create a safety poster for a rule they think we need at Dublin. I'd say they did pretty awesome!

Monday, November 2nd

 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...

Friday, October 2nd

 Hello Weckie Families!

It has been another fantastic couple of weeks in Kindergarten-land!! Our Weckies have really done a nice job catching onto our morning routines, making new friends and learning to be good listeners on the rug and at their tables! A HUGE thank you to everyone for continuing to send in peanut and tree nut free snacks for your child each day. I know it can take extra time to read labels, but it is so important that we are all working together on this and keeping our space safe for all!

I have reached out to our parents planning our Halloween Party and the wheels are in motion for a fun morning party on the 31st for our Weckies! More details to come in the next few weeks including a JK/Kindergarten Concert (still waiting on a date... tbd) to go along with our fall/Halloween party!

Also another HUGE thank you to everyone who has signed up for the Color Run! We attended our first assembly last week and had the BEST time learning about being good people and being good people at Dublin!

Phonics

In Phonics we have been busy, busy, busy! We have been playing with letter sounds in UFLI and learning all about the different ways we use our voice, our mouth, our lips, tongue and teeth to make different letter sounds. We have also been working on our letter formation using straight lines, diagonal lines and curves to make uppercase letters. In our Calkins unit we have been playing with our names! All names are up on the Word Wall and we learned a song that helps us to learn our letters by recognizing the first letter in a name and having to guess the name Mrs. Weckstein is thinking of! We also did a rhyming activity with the song "Willoughby Wallaby Woo!' Last we took time this week to start learning about syllables in words and finding the beat(s) in words. We used our names to practice counting 1, 2 and even 3 syllables in our names. If your child is still not able to write their first name, please continue to practice this at home as we practice this daily at school! We also got out Play Dough this week and practice using our hands to build our muscles and make our letters... the Weckies LOVED this! Lastly we had parent helpers in this week who began working with groups of kids to practice learning the names of the upper case and lower case letters and their corresponding sounds. 

  

Readers' Workshop

In Readers' Workshop we have continued to learn the routines of workshop time: Minilesson, Independent Reading, Partner Reading and then a Share time. Each part of the workshop is helping us to familiarize ourselves with parts of books, how to look at books and what to notice as we look at the words and illustrations! The Weckies especially loved showing their books from home to their partner at workshop time!

Writers' Workshop

In Writers' Workshop we have been celebrating all that we have learned so far about writing! We are using big and small shapes to make our pictures, brainstorming words for Mrs. Weckstein to add to our work. We have assigned jobs now for writing time including table captains and table setters! You can ask your Weckie if they have a job this rotation for Writers' Workshop and if so, what do they do?

Math Workshop

In Math we are digging deep on our counting and our familiarity with numbers! We are in the midst of a number book that we will bring home next week which is helping us learn to write our numbers and show our numbers using: tallies, dice, five frames/ten frames, dominoes or our fingers. We also learned how to play a group game called "Gotcha!" with a magic number, count dots quickly using "Quick Looks" and we worked with counters and five frames in whole group.

Social Studies    

Last we started our new Social Studies unit on rules and laws in our community. We listened to a story called "What if Everyone Did That?" and talked about why we have rules and how they are there to keep us safe!

Pics from around the room:

And the applesauce was a HIT! Thanks for all of the amazing apples that were sent in! :-)

 We started our Weckie Star week with Mrs. Weckstein! 

 (Our amazing fifth grade safeties)

Friday, September 18th

 Hello Weckie Parents!

 Welcome to our space in blog-land!! We have been SO super busy in Kindergarten making new friends, learning about our friends, learning our new routines and rules, playing and more!! Please read the blog below to learn and see all about our new learning!

Phonics/UFLI

In UFLI we have been taking time to learn all about letter sounds and the different ways we use our mouth, teeth, tongue and even our nose to make these sounds! Different sounds make you do different things with your teeth, tongue, mouth and nose. Some sounds we are learning, do not even use our voices! We have talked about "stop sounds" and "nose sounds". Additionally we have been doing "sky writing" where we use our arms and "magical finger" to practice talking about letters and how they can use lines and curves to make the letter formation. This is HUGE right now in Kindergarten, reminding our writers to go from "top to bottom, left to right" when forming letters. 

In our Units of Study Phonics we have been learning to about the letters in our name and in our class mascot, Mabel's name! We have been creating "get to know you" posters each day for a new star student, we have been playing with name puzzles and we have been practicing our handwriting on our white boards. On the side we have also been working our way through a mini-book that is teaching us how to write upper and lowercase letters as well as reviewing the letter sounds. We are almost done with this 26 page book!

"Alphardy" Phonics Song

We sing the song above daily to help reinforce learning all of our lower case and upper case letters and their sounds. My lofty goal is to have these mastered by all students by December! Please play this song at home too and help your child with the sounds and see if they can teach you the hand motions. :-)

Readers' Workshop

We have launched our Readers' Workshop! Mini lesson topics have included:

*Reading books to learn about the world (we read Fur, Feather, Fins: We Are All Kin and Packs: Strength in Numbers) to model how we can learn from our books

*Learning how books work (front cover, back cover, back blurb, title, title page, reading from right to left, top to bottom)

*Learning how readers can go back and re-read to get more information or learn something new from a familiar book

*Learning how to read by ourselves and ignoring distractions around the room

Thank you to ALL who have sent in baggies of books for your kiddo to look at! We will be using those starting on Monday. Currently the kids have been using baskets made up of a variety of familiar books from our classroom library.

Writers' Workshop

In Writers' Workshop we have launched our workshop and have been learning all about the routines and rituals of Writers' Workshop. We have learned about using our writing folders as a tool to help us to stay organized and to use the ABC chart inside for help with our letters. We have been using shapes and lines to help us draw illustrations and we have talked about using the right colors when we are coloring our illustrations.

Math Workshop

Counting, counting, counting! We have been counting everything in math! We are currently working with counting from 1 to 20 and have learned a few games to help us practice our counting. We have talked about our birthdays and have been reviewing the months of the year as well as the days of the week. To do this, here are two great songs you can review at home with your Weckie:

Days of the Week Song 

Months of the Year 

Upcoming Important Dates:

**No school on Monday, September 21st

**PTA Stargazing Event on September 24th at Walled Lake OEC (Check Dublin PTA Facebook for more info OR Dublin Times from Mrs. Karban :-))

Pics from around the room:

Friday, March 20th

 Well whoops!! I guess we have just been SO super busy in Kindergarten that I've put the Blog aside for a bit!! So here we are, it's March, these kids are doing AMAZING things and we are LOVING having so many fun Mystery Readers this month!!

Phonics

In Phonics we have been spending all of our time lately playing with the short vowels of a, e, i, o and u! We have a favorite song that we listen to often to help us to remember the short vowel songs. Short Vowels Song <-- Be sure to check it out and have your Weckie sing it with you! We have been using the vowel sounds to help us write CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. Then we have taken our knowledge of the short vowel sounds and consonant sounds to put them together to make many words and even short sentences!

Readers' Workshop

In Readers' Workshop this unit, we have been focusing in on boosting our "Super Reader Powers"! We have been studying the pictures in books to look for clues about the characters, the setting and the text on the page. We have learned how to change our thinking about a character as characters change across the pages of a story. We have also used the illustrations to help us do some envisioning, or making a movie in our minds about what we are reading. Reading groups continue to meet daily and I am seeing such great progress! Remember to use Literacy Footprints, the digital ereader, at home too with your child! You can easily access this on Classlink! 

Writers' Workshop

We are now writing about true stories in Writers' Workshop... a time when something happened! I told the kids in my story all about Liam, my oldest, winning a 55" tv over February Break in a contest at Zap Zone! Several have been working on great stories from vacations, camping trips, Grandma's house and more! We are remembering to spread our stories out across three pages, not telling the whole story on one page. We are also working on carefully inserting those short vowels into our words now that we know their important sounds!

Mathematics

In Math we have been playing a LOT with the tricky teens! We have been working on writing on number grids up to 100. We have been practicing learning to solve number stories and to make combinations of ten. We are also working now on fine tuning our counting skills when counting by 2s! I'm so amazed at how well they are counting by 1s, 5s and 10s in our class!

Science

We have just begun our unit on Air and Weather! We have been looking at great mentor texts to learn all of the new vocabulary. We have gone outside to check the temperature on thermometers and have our own rain gauge out there measuring the precipitation that is falling! We even made wind catchers so we can take them out to measure the windspeed!

Important Dates Coming Up:

Monday, March 23: Rock your Funky Mismatched Socks for World Down Syndrome Day

Tuesday, March 24: Wear your favorite color from head to toe

Wednesday, March 25: Wear your favorite sports team jersey/shirt

Thursday, March 26: Dress in Purple Day for Epilepsy Awareness

Friday, March 27: Pajama Read In Day (PJS, a blanket, a pillow and books from home can all come in- no stuffies please)