Hello parents!
We have successfully made it through week two of Kindergarten! We had a short week due to Labor Day. We also celebrated Mass together for the first time as a school on Friday! Students did a wonderful job with conducting themselves appropriately.
This week we began our true academic curriculum. For reading, we start with doing a letter a day and at the beginning of the year we are just practicing recognizing the letter. We started with letters Aa, Tt, and Bb. We do teacher letters out of order based on the sound they make, the level of difficulty of the sound that letter makes, and it’s frequency of use in the English language. We do introduce the sounds at the beginning of the year but when first making our way through we focus on being able to identify the letter. We read stories with words that start with the letter we are working on, we practice searching for that letter, writing it, and even make a list of words we can think of that start with that letter!
We also learned our first sight word — “am”! Students learned the word and practiced spelling it, using it in a sentence, and recognizing the letters within it. We added it to our sound wall, which has the letters we have learned about so far (separated by vowels and consonants) and underneath we will continue to list new words we learn under the letter/sound they begin with.
This week, we also focused on the color red. At the beginning of the year, we will do a new color every week not only to reinforce recognizing the colors but also to try and learn how to recognize the color word. These lessons are also great opportunities with using our scissors!
At the beginning of the week, we had a special visitor! Our classroom aide, Ms. Patty, brought her grandson, Bentley, into the class for the morning and he read the class a story. The students were so excited!
In Math, we worked on sorting things. We practiced sorting things by color and learning the words different, same, and alike! We also are continuing work on patterns, which some students need to practice quite a bit. Especially with patterns that are a little more complex than ABABABAB.
Another fun thing that students got to do this week was visit Mrs. Shearer, the guidance counselor, for a social-emotional learning lesson! This is something that will be happening once a month, students will go as a class to visit her in her room and she will conduct a lesson on naming emotions and learning how to process them.
This is special addition to our social emotional learning curriculum that goes on in Kindergarten. Another aspect is that everyday after students return from lunch and recess we do at least 5 minutes of yoga. We do this so that so we can find some calmness through movement so that we can make it through the second half of the day.
We are working diligently on handwriting and doing other tasks to help develop our fine motor skills, like playing with Play-Doh!
This upcoming week we will have our first week of clubs, which will be held every alternating Friday (alternating with Mass). Your student has chosen/was assigned to a club based on their interests, and they will go to that teacher who is running that club and spend that time with them and the other students who are in it.
We also will be working on letter Ll, Ff, Hh, and Pp this week along with working on numbers one through five and the color orange.
If there is anything you would like to share with me please feel free to reach out! I will see you all soon!
Love,
Ms. V