Kindergarten News

What a busy but awesome week we have had! Thank you for sharing your children with me! We have spent lots of time establishing rules and practicing classroom procedures and we are making progress. This is a very slow process, but going SLOW as we learn procedures now will allow us to go FAST with learning later!

We have also spent a lot of time getting to know each other and learning how to be good citizens and friends. I asked the students, "What are we at school to do? What do we need to do to make that happen?" We used their ideas to create our class "Mission Statement" (see picture). See if your child can recite our mission statement, with actions!

• The September snack calendar is coming home in TOYS folders today.
• August 27th: School pictures! Information about ordering was sent home this week. All ordering is online... you will not send money to school.
• September 2nd (Labor Day): NO SCHOOL
• Scholastic Book Club flyers are in TOYS folders today. If you are interested in ordering books from Scholastic, click here. This is a great way to build your "at home" library. Our class code is VYBV4. Orders are due next Friday, August 30th.
• This week I introduced the students to our "clip chart" for behavior. Starting today, your child will have a calendar taped inside their TOYS folder where they will keep track of what color they were on each day. Please leave this in the folder. Remember that the color is much less important than the choices they are making, so use this as a teaching opportunity. Please ask if you have questions!
• Your child brought home a "Me Bag" this week, along with instructions and a schedule. Please send it on your child's assigned day. Do not send it before your child's day, as I do not have room to store all of them. Have your child practice telling about their Me Bag at home, and remind them to speak loud and clear! This is a great way to practice speaking and listening skills.
• Make sure your child's water bottle is filled with water when you send it to school. They can refill it during the day if needed. Your child may need to practice opening their water bottle and refilling it.
• Some students have asked if they can take their water bottle to lunch. They cannot take their water bottle to lunch because they tend to get lost. Students can bring a drink in their lunchbox, they can buy a drink in the cafeteria, or there is a water dispenser in the cafeteria (with cups) that they can use.

Monday: Amelia

Tuesday: Avery

Wednesday: Claire

Thursday: Ellison

Friday: Emmett

Next week we will be learning about sharing, being kind, and being a good citizen and friend. During the first few days of school, we read the book, I Promise, by LeBron James and created our class "promises" or rules (see the chart below). We read three different books, Rainbow Fish, No David, and Listen Buddy. We talked about the lessons the characters learned in each book, and how those lessons can help us to be a good citizen and friend. We will continue to reinforce those lessons this week!

I will begin doing some reading assessments next week to help guide instruction. These are all done one-on-one, so it will take a few weeks. Once I have completed all of the assessments I will be able to differentiate more and start small groups.

We will read I Am, My Friends, Llama Llama Time to Share, and I Am Sharing.

Here are the concepts and strategies we will be working on:

• Locating the front and back cover of a book
• One-to-one matching (pointing to each word as we read)
• Explaining what an author does, and what an illustrator does
• Making text-to-self connections

Next week we will start our "Writer's Workshop." This is a time every day when we will learn what writers do, and become writers ourselves! We will talk about what the teacher does and what the students do during Writer's Workshop. We will begin writing personal narratives. Students will use pictures and/or words to write stories about their lives. I'm so excited to see the students become authors!

We will spend the first couple of weeks building a foundation for learning about letters and sounds. We are learning about how we use different kinds of lines to write different letters, and how we use our teeth, lips, and tongue to make different letter sounds. Our Word Study time also includes Phonological Awareness (the ability to recognize and work with sounds in spoken language). This is very important as students are learning to read! The Phonological Skills we will work on this week include:

• Clapping sentences
• Counting words in sentences
• Blending compound words
• Listening for pairs of rhyming words

Learning about letters, sounds, words, etc. is not completely linear. In other words, we do not work on one skill or one letter at a time, master it, and move on. We work on many different things all at the same time, and children's knowledge is gradually building over time. It may seem like they suddenly start reading one day, but in reality, the foundation is being built over time.

Our goal next week is to identify, write, and represent numbers 0-5.

We will practice numbers 0-5 by playing several different games. We will also do many "subitizing" activities. Subitizing is the ability to quickly recognize how many objects are in a set without counting. For example, when you see a dot pattern on dice or dominoes, you do not need to count each dot... you can tell instantly how many it is. That's subitizing. Check out the video below!

We will also practice writing numbers 0-5 with the correct formation.

I will be doing some assessments in Math as well. Again, once I have completed the assessments I will be able to differentiate.

Kindergarten Instructor

Email: abbylowe@missouristate.edu
Location: Greenwood Laboratory School Missouri State, East Harrison Street, Springfield, MO, USA
Phone: 417-836-5620