Hello everyone! I hope you have been having a good past couple weeks! Let’s recap what has been going on in Kindergarten.
We had a visit from Reading Is Fundamental and the students got to pick one book to take home to keep. Our Kindergarten classroom got to keep a book as well, which we read together, called A Computer Called Katherine: How Katherine Johnson Helped Put America on the Moon by Suzanne Slade. Students have been reading and learning about many leaders in Black History and have been enjoying learning the difference between fiction and non-fiction.
Students have been playing plenty in Kindergarten, as usual! Collaborating on creations, working as a team to build their rock collection, making things out of Play-Doh, and practicing their yoga breathing at the end of a crazy recess are just a small part of our daily play activities. Different kinds of play are so beneficial to academic and social development which is why we put a large emphasis on it and why I add a concrete, consistent Free Play period into our Kindergarten schedule every year.
We had another visit from Mrs. Cook, our guidance counselor last week where she helped students learn about the things that trigger their anger and what we can do to help cope with our anger. Students came up with ideas like doing some yoga, taking deep breaths, taking a nap or laying down, asking for space or to take a walk, asking for a hug, etc. as ways to help cope with anger instead of doing something destructive, hurtful, or disrespectful. We also have started doing our “Word of the Week”, in which we read one story from E is for Ethics by Ian James Corlett, and try to discuss and implement that skill from that story as much as possible. Our first word was Honesty! Students discussed the importance of being honest and building trust, and how honesty gets rewarded.
In Math we are moving on up with counting higher numbers and we have begun skip counting by tens! Students have picked up on it so quickly, with the help of our sticks that we use to count how many days we’ve been in school. All year long we have been grouping them by tens, and eventually by hundreds), so students were already familiar with the concept. We will continue to work on that and eventually venture into other kinds of skip counting.
Also in Math, students have been succeeding in addition. We will continue to work on it as my goal for Kindergarten is to not rely on pictures given to help them add. I want the students to either remember certain addition facts, be able to draw their own, to count on, etc. We have just begun working on subtraction – reminding students that with addition we were putting groups together and then counting how many we had all together and getting a greater number, where as with subtraction we are taking away a group and seeing how many we have left over which would get a lesser number. Please continue to practice counting 11-50 at home as much as possible as we don’t want students to fall behind in one skill when practicing another.
In Reading we have been mastering long vowel sounds in the middle position and a silent e at the end. Students have been doing very well with these words and have been reading up a storm! We also are starting working on consonant blends in the initial position, so words like stop, click, brag, etc. where there are two consonants that are still making individual sounds but don’t have vowel in between to break them up. This is usually something I save for later in the year but students have already been showing an aptitude for decoding these 4 and 5 sound words! We also have been looking at the letter Yy and how it can function as a vowel in certain words, particularly when it is in the ending position. When it’s at the end of the word, the letter Yy can say either a long Ii sound or a long Ee sound. Learning this rule will help Kindergarten with decoding many new words!
In writing, students have graduated from using their handwriting books to now using their own writing journals! We are using these writing journals to practice writing sentences, spelling, and our sight words. We also are drawing pictures to go along with our sentences and practicing writing the date and page numbers in these journals. We will continue to use these throughout the year and it will be interesting to see how students’ writing skills develop throughout the next couple of months!
In Religion, we have been discussing Lent and how we are getting ready for Easter! We just started Benjamin’s Box: The Story of the Resurrection Eggs. This book and it’s eggs that come as a supplemental learning tool help bring the story of Easter to life through the eyes of a young child who witnesses it all. Students get to hear, see, and touch things like fabric that would have been used to wrap Jesus and the coins that Judas would have received as payment. These lessons will be daily leading up to our Spring Break.
Coming up, we will be doing some fun things for St. Patrick’s Day and start getting excited for the start of a new season – Spring!
We have our Spring Break coming up in two weeks! Students will be excited to have some well earned time off!
As always feel free to reach out with any questions!
Warmly,
Mrs. V 🙂