Happy New Year!

Hello everyone!

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a lovely holiday vacation. I know that I needed this break and have come back feeling recharged, and I hope that the students feel the same!

We had a shortened week due to our surprise day off on Friday. Please make sure to have your student complete the flexible instruction day packet that was sent home so that they can be considered present for January 7th!

On Monday students were with Ms. Kelly due to my absence. Most of the day was spent doing play-based instruction and reacclimating students back into the classroom and the routine. After being going for so long, it can take some time to get back into the swing of things!

On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday students were lucky enough to have some work with centers and small groups due to having a few students absent this week and having Ms. Kelly in our room in the mornings. It was helpful for students to be able to split into two groups and have some more individual working time. It also gave the chance for some differentiation of the work so that it could be better tailored to students’ needs. We were able to use our tablets for the first time as well, which students were very excited about!

In ELA we went over the letters Ii, Mm, Ss, and Tt (in their F.I.D. packet). We reviewed listening to the beginning sound in a word but also listening for middle and ending sounds in words. For middle sounds we use the concept of stretching out the word to really emphasize the vowel in the middle. We have also started talking about long vowel sounds and short vowel sounds when discussing middle sounds in a word. We use our bodies to demonstrate the short sound by taking a short step when we make it, and a big long step while making the long vowel sound. We also say that the long vowel sound is when the letter is “saying it’s own name”.

We also added the word “my” to our word wall. We practiced finding sight words in our morning message more than once this week and even played a game where students had to look between two similar looking sight words and figure out which one I was asking for.

This week we hit hard with practicing numbers 11-20. We had a competition between students split into teams to see who could most accurately build a tower with the correct number of blocks. Concepts of counting higher numbers are quite simple to reinforce at home. In the coming weeks we will be pushing students to count all the way to one hundred so have them practice as much as they can.

This upcoming week we will practice reading some more short decodable stories and working on isolating more middle and ending sounds. I’m excited to have our friends back in the classroom and I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!

 

Warmly,

Ms. V 🙂

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