Hello families!
I hope you all have had a great weekend.
This week Kindergarten has been working a lot on keeping our hands to ourselves. One thing I’ve been hearing a lot from students is that they’ve been told that if someone hits them, they should hit them back. I have been telling students that at school the rule is if someone touches them in a way they don’t want them too that they need to walk away and come tell an adult. This is so that situations don’t escalate and that they aren’t feeding into another student’s poor choices. A lot of students are also not being malicious in the way they touch another student, but it’s more just disruptive than anything else. On Tuesday we watched this video that teaches us that “hands are for helping”. Feel free to watch it again with your student and use the same language at home about controlling our body. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsQxZq1BoiY&t=327s&ab_channel=TheFuZees
This week Kindergarten learned the letters M, H, I, T, and K. Students have been learning about what the letter looks like in uppercase and lowercase, how to write them, and have been introduced to the sounds the letter makes and listening for the sound in the beginning of the word. We started working in our reading workbooks for the first time!
All of the cutting and pasting practice has already been making a big difference with their ability to use scissors correctly. They’ve been doing great!
Students also have been enjoying some free reading and using headphones when they need to cancel out any unwanted noise!
Students also have learned their first two sight words: “I” and “the”. They have been posted up on our word wall and throughout the year we will be adding a couple more a week. One way students can practice these words at home is to look for them wherever they can and have them point them out! They can look for them in books, signs, magazines, etc.
In Science this week, students had the chance to use their different senses to try and figure out what was in our Mystery Box. They had to put their hand in with their eyes closed and feel it, we shook the box and listened to the sound it made, and they even smelled what was inside the box!
We also have started working in our Math books this week. Students are working on sorting things and learning the vocabulary words “same” , “alike”, and “different”. We sorted some toys by color as a whole class before we began working in our workbooks.
We also have been working on recognizing numbers 1-10. We used color blotters and rolled dice as a class so that we could count the dots and then find the correct number to use. Students have also been doing some color by numbers worksheets, which helps with recognizing the numbers and identifying color words.
Students have been enjoying doing yoga every day after we have our quiet time.
Some students have been very forgetful with their belongings, but we’re working on it! Learning to be responsible for our belongings is a skill we work on all year. This one jacket has been in the room for over a week and none of the students can seem to remember who it belongs to. Let me know if you recognize it!
This upcoming week students will have Mass again, and we will have Ms. Kelly in our room to help out the whole week! We also will have DIBELS testing next week to evaluate where students are at with some key reading skills.
It’s been great to be able to talk to so many of you about your students… please feel free to reach out if you’d like to speak further about anything!
Hope you all have a great week.
Love,
Ms. V