January 2018

KINDERGARTEN CONNECTION

WE TAKE CARE OF OURSELVES

WE TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER

WE TAKE CARE OF THIS PLACE

January proves to be a magical time in kindergarten as the students academic and social skills really take off!

We can rotate independently through literacy and math stations! Ask your child to teach you all about the different stations: Guided reading, word study, iPad, ABC (phonics), FUNdations, Writer’s Workshop, number study, partner games, theme, Workplaces and math exploration.

Literacy Highlights

We can read and write the listed high frequency words quickly. Make a word wall in your home and encourage your child to practice reading and writing these words often. Hunt for high frequency words in books and magazines. Write a note/letter to someone special using these words. Write a story about an important moment or event and notice how many of these words you use. These are the words we know in a snap: I, am, a, can, the, we, see, will, he, she, it, is, in, no, yes, on, have, like, look, you, are, love, me, for, my, so, go, off, big, little, up, and, an, if, Mom, Dad, going, and are. 

We are learning how to put two sounds together to read and write initial blends in words such as flap,trip, brick, and frog. We learned the –ake spelling pattern and discovered that –ake is in make, snake, cake, lake, rake, fake, bake and Jake. We noticed that the e at the end of these words is silent and helps the first vowel a make its long sound. We are studying word families to understand that knowing how to read one word can sometimes help us read other words if they have the same spelling pattern. For example, knowing the words cat can help us read the words mat, sat, rat, hat, pat, bat, chat... 

We are learning how to tap consonant-vowel-consonant (cvc) words on our fingers to isolate individual letter sounds and then blend all three sounds together to read and write cvc words. Ask your child to teach you how to tap the words cat, dog, fun, lip, pot, sit, and hot.  

As always, make time to read and write with your child everyday :)

Math Highlights

Our focus this week was on creating, representing and solving addition and subtraction problems in multiple ways. Just for fun, play addition and subtraction games with your child using pennies and beans. Ask your child: How many different combinations to make 5 or 10? What happens to a group when you add or subtract 1? Encourage your child to justify his/her math reasoning with words, objects, or equations.

Counting, counting, and more counting! We are working hard at counting on from random numbers, counting by 10's, counting backwards from 20, and skip counting to 20 by 2’s. We are also working on identifying before and after numbers. In addition, we are learning how to use graphs to collect and analyze date.

Science Highlights

Ask your child to describe the day's weather to you. Talk about why we have different weather conditions and how weather impacts our lives and choices. Study the weekly forecast with your child to look for weather patterns and changes.

We can build simple sentences to match picture stories.

We can form uppercase letters the kindergarten way!

We just added this game to our iPad homepage. 

We can represent teen numbers as a group of ten and some more ones.

We can decompose numbers.

We can play addition games with our math partners.

We can use multiple reading strategies to help us read new texts.

Our sight word book basket is overflowing! This book helped us learn to read the word my.

We can name vowels and make their corresponding sounds.
We know that every word has to have at least one vowel. 

This book inspired us to make our own snowmen and write fiction stories 
about what their snow friend would do at night.

We read The Mitten and discussed important story elements.
We read and enjoyed all of Jan Brett's books.

We continue to work hard at writing true stories.

Water Color Directed Drawing

Pajama and Stuffed Animal Day before winter break

We love snow!

Happy New Year!
We talked about setting resolutions or goals for the new year.
We passed around a celebration ball and shared our goals for the second half of kindergarten. 

Hallway Picnic

It was easy for us to generate a list of cold weather words.