What's Happening This Week?

It should be a really fun and short week.  Our Halloween Party is Thursday afternoon.  It sounds like there is alot of wonderful things planned by our fabulous moms!

In Language Arts, we will start a new unit.  This week we will learn the letter Ii and it's short sound, the popcorn word to, and the comprehansion strategy of visualization. We are progressing in Writer's Workshop talking about letters to make words, words to make sentences, and sentences to make stories.

In Math, we will be working with numbers to 10 in sets and 10 frames.

In Religion, we will talk about Noah and the Ark.

Our thematic unit this week will be Halloween, so we will read many Halloween stories and make some fun Halloween crafts.

Last week, we did some activities with scarecrows.  Here are some photos of the scarecrows the kindergartners made.

Happy Columbus Day! -A little late

On Monday,  we learned all about Christopher Columbus and how he sailed the ocean blue in 1492.  Wee Talked about what it means to be an explorer.  After we read a couple books about him, we completed a very fun art activity.  Here are some photos of the Nina sailing the ocean blue.

What's Happening This Week?

This week we will be meeting our 7th grade buddies for the first time on Friday and making a Halloween craft with them.  This is always so fun and exciting for both grades!  Pictures will be posted.

In Language Arts, we are continuing to work on the comprehension strategy ask and answer questions.  We will learn how to correctly form letter Tt, it's sound and blending it with letters a, m, s, and p to read words.  We will also be learning about verbs-we call them action words too, but also say verbs. In Writer's Workshop we will be working on conventions of print such as when to use an uppercase letter and ending punctuation marks.  In Math, we will be comparing, ordering and counting forward with numbers to 10.  In Religion, we will discuss ways to care for God's world. Our thematic unit will focus on pumpkins this week. 

I will be sending home reminders of your conference times we have set up.

As a special request, I would like you to pray for my dear friend Sally Langenbahn, who taught kindergarten here with me for many years.  She just lost her son in law leaving behind Sally's daughter and 18 month old son.  Thank you for  thinking of them.  I know many of you know her, and for those who don't she is an amazing person with a wonderful family.

Blending

Now that we have learned some consonants and the short vowel a, we have started blending these sounds to read words.  Each week we will add another letter and sound. Blending letter sounds is an early reading strategy to read words we are not familiar with. It is such an important skill, even if we can read fairly well in kindergarten. As we read more complex text, we need this skill to break down and blend larger words and their word parts.  So far we have learned letters p, m, s and a.  Today, we used these letters to blend the words am, Sam, Pam, map, maps and sap.  There are many fun apps, and online games for blending.  Here is a link to one of those games.  Happy Reading!

http://pbskids.org/lions/games/blending.html

Read to Someone

As often as we can, we do what I like to call Read to Someone.  I pair up the students and they read to each other.  We like to sit EEKK (elbow to elbow, knee to knee) and say this poem:

Elbow to elbow, knee to knee

I'll read to you, you read to me.

Elbow to elbow, knee to knee

Book in the middle so we both can see.

 

In order to become better at anything, we just need to do it and experience it.  Reading is no exception.  I always tell the students how much fun reading is!  Here are some pictures of the kindergarteners reading to each other. It's amazing how far they have all come in just a few short weeks!