Hello everyone!
I hope you all have been enjoying this long weekend full of snow! Students received 1 or 2 sheets of homework focused on Martin Luther King, Jr. They also received a packet just in case of school being cancelled tomorrow. This packet does NOT need to be completed unless school Tuesday is cancelled. If it is not cancelled, please just send the packet back in with your student because that is the work we will be completing during the day.
We have been talking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his accomplishments this whole week. This provided many different opportunities for important and difficult conversations. We have overlapped this with our reading lessons by using the multiple books we have read about him to also recognize sight words and practice decoding some short simple words. We also did some practicing with ABC Order and learning new words like “dream”.
This past week we did DIBELS testing for the middle of the year. Students were tested on letter sounds, letter naming, and their ability to isolate each sound in a word. One of the big goals for Kindergarten in the next couple of months is to get better at isolating every single sound in a word. We call it tapping out a word and we have students tap different fingers when doing the beginning, middle, and ending sound. At the moment we are working on three sound words but at home feel free to challenge your student with four sound words like “stop”, “skip”, “frog”, etc.
We were able to do a lot of differentiated reading groups this week, and it has been great to have students practice reading more and more. At home, have students read with you by echoing what you read and following along with their finger.
In Math we continued to work on numbers 11-20. We had students do plenty of hands on activity with just counting over and over all the way up to 20. Some students still need to be practicing this at home because many keep skipping numbers and messing up those counts. One of the phone ways we practiced this was giving students puzzles and making them count the pieces and then writing down the number on a white board before they were allowed to put the puzzle together. This helps me check their counting and their ability to write two-digit numbers correctly — many students have trouble with flipping two-digit numbers (this is called transpositioning). This is something we will be practicing this whole year.
Students had Ms. Byron visited this week to practice more social-emotional skills.
At the end of the week students had some structured “extra recess” as a prize won by one of the students, and one of the fun activities they got to do was use their stamps and ink pads for the first time. They loved getting a chance to be creative and make pictures with the stamps!
This upcoming week will be a short one, as we do not have school today and we won’t have any on Friday.
Next week on the 27th will be parent-teacher conferences. I have decided to make them all virtual in order to be safe with the rising number of cases of Covid-19. I’m going to do something a little different with conferences this time around and I will send out a sign up sheet for times and you can go ahead and fill in the time that you would like to have. You can manually fill your child’s name into a time slot onto the Google Sheet. It will be first come, first serve. If any of the times do not match up your schedule please let me know so we can schedule another time.
Thank you and let me know if you have any questions you have!
Love,
Ms. V 🙂