Hello everybody! I hope the holidays treated you all well and that you’re ready to take on the new year!

Here in Kindergarten, I actually was extremely impressed with how quickly we have gotten back into the swing of things! Before the break, we were finishing up our review of the alphabet and the letter sounds. We had also begun “tapping out” words, which is just a technique that we use to isolate the individual sounds in a word. Now that we’ve returned to school we’ve picked up right where we left off! We are trying to wrap up our Handwriting books so that we can soon move into our writing journals. We have been encouraging the students to write independently as much as possible, and to try figuring out how to spell words on their own without worrying about mistakes.

Another skill we introduced before the break, and that we are only strengthening more and more is learning the vowels. Students learned a special song to help remind them of the vowels. We also have been distinguishing between long vowels (when the letter says it’s own name) and short vowels (when the letter makes it’s typical sound). Students have been using long and short steps while saying these vowel sounds to try and reinforce the skill! We’ve been utilizing all sorts of tools in our classroom like puzzles, tablets, small group work, and group games to focus on these various reading skills.

In Math, we reviewed shapes and patterns this week. We will continue to strengthen Kindergarten’s knowledge of numbers 11 and beyond, and soon we will be introducing concepts of addition and subtraction. We also have been doing lots of work on place value and counting backwards, specifically using the word ‘before’. At home, it would be great for students to get even more practice seeing and counting the higher numbers. One easy way to do this would be to make a number line and hang it up in their bedroom.

As the quarter comes to a close, we will be wrapping up Science and moving back into Social Studies. In Social Studies we will be talking about Black historical figures, until the end of the third quarter.

In the next two weeks we will be doing our middle of the year DIBELS testing, and I will be sending out sign up sheets for parent-teacher conferences that will be happening on Thursday, January 26th. Report cards will also be coming out during that week as well.

Also, tomorrow we will be joined by two new students! Carter and Elliott! We are excited about the new additions to our classroom!

Let me know if there’s anything coming up that you have questions about!

 

Warmly,

Ms. V 🙂