Happy Sunday! I hope everyone is having a lovely weekend.

Here is a recap of how our week went!

In reading this week we are still practicing middle and ending sounds. We did some puzzles to put together words that had short i sounds, long e, and short e sounds! We are practicing decoding (a fancy word for “sounding out”) words more and more, and students got to pair up and practice reading some sentences to each other from their reading workbooks. They love helping out if someone gets stuck, and this positive encouragement and help from peers can help build confidence and engagement! Now that students know all of their sounds we are working on them being able to apply this knowledge and do it quickly! The goal is to have them reading automatically. Drilling the letter sounds and sight words at home will make this easier!

We also did another class book report, but decided to combine it with Social Studies! We are still learning about “the past”, so we read a story about Jackie Robinson. This was our first book report on a non-fiction story, so it looked a little different than usual. But Kindergarten gave all of the information needed because they were really into this story! They loved that Jackie Robinson played many sports, and they were inspired by his ability to make “good choices”, as we call them in our classroom, even in the face of adversity. Talking about Jackie Robinson even inspired a conversation about women’s rights back when he was alive! A student asked, “How come there were no girls playing baseball?” We had an honest discussion about this, and I told them that in the future we will be learning about some famous black female athletes as well. I am so proud of how perceptive they are and how they challenge these stories!

In Math we are finishing up our chapter on addition! Students had a couple of “projects” (aka, assignments that are a multiple step process and require more time) that had to do with addition, including doing a multistep color by numbers and using manipulatives to complete a cut and paste addition sentence making ten. We are still reviewing numbers 11 to 100, and students are getting better and better at writing these bigger numbers correctly! We did a lot of fun counting games and even did a worksheet to practice identifying higher numbers correctly.

 

Here is a link to a great skip counting video you can watch at home for practice!

Students also had TWO visits from the school guidance counselor, Ms. Byron! They learned about how to be assertive, confident, and direct when asking for something or telling the truth about something that happened. They also practiced identifying feelings through facial expressions and body language! These are both two important social-emotional skills that we will continue to work on on our own. On Friday we had our second OperaTots session! Students learned the plot of the opera they are going to see, and learned some theater vocabulary like stage, audience, curtain, etc. They even got to look at different pictures of different kinds of theaters and stages! They of course got to dance and sing quite a bit as well.

Be sure to have your student submit their homework (the dominos addition page) by next Friday. I am looking forward to next week and all of the fun new things we will do!

Love,

Ms. V