Ladies and Gentleman... We have lift off! (Week 2 of kindergarten)

Wow! What a difference a week has made! The kids are doing shockingly well. My new school home is quite a bit larger than my previous, and I was concerned over the children having to cover so much ground during the day. They've done great! The children are getting the routines and rituals down!  I'm very happy :)

This week we got started on curriculum. That's awesome!  We are doing a quick letter study to begin- this week we are working on recognizing and naming Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd, and Ee. We are also working to understand and use ordinal words like first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth. The story we read in our unit this week was "The Little School Bus." We focused on understanding what characters were, and naming the characters of stories we read. We tried to match words that rhyme. We sang songs about going to school, so if you have has to listen to your child singing "Everyone get on the bus, get on the bus...," I apologize! The songs kind of crawl into your brain. My household is not impressed. 

We learned about sight words this week. "Sight words" are words that we have to recognize quickly (by "sight"). They are words that need to be memorized, because often they cannot be "sounded out." (Have you ever tried to sound out "the?"). We introduced 3 words this week- I, am, the. Have your child look for those words in print.  

Anyway, every Thursday I will send the home information page that comes from the curriculum series. This tells you what we've been covering, and provides suggestions for follow up activities at home. It looks like this: 

It will go home in your child's Thursday Folder.  It's a great resource and can help you connect with your child over what they are learning and talking about in school. 

We also continued working on isolating the beginning sounds of words for phonemic awareness.(Sidebar- good job on the homework this week! I noticed less confusion when I was asking the kids for the beginning sound, not the letter! Thank you for the help!) 

We started centers this week, too! The children have done a good job learning about the workboard and using it to locate their daily centers. I'll try to post a picture tomorrow or the next day. I will send home any center work they've done in their Thursday folder. Not every center has a "product," but some will have corresponding paper worksheets, etc.

Look for a post in the next few days about Writer's Workshop. I'd have trouble condensing it to a few sentences, and we had some really awesome successes this week! 

We made a school bus craft to go along with our story of this week. Crafts are not my strong suit, I am so grateful to work with such a collaborative team. Your kids are getting so much more hands on art experiences because of it! Even kindergarten teachers are good share-ers!

As a class, we are still working to maintain focus in the afternoon. I'd like to see us get a little more math done later the day.  We are still in great shape for week two of school! So far, we have been focusing on using the calendar, saying the days of the week, and counting to 20 without missing any numbers. We also made a graph about how our class goes home. By looking at our graph, the students realized that most of the kids in our class go home by car. The smallest group was the daycare group. 

I hope that helps! I want to share with you what we do in class. I hope it will make you feel closer to your little person while they are gone all day. I also hope it will give you things to talk about with them.  Talking at home about what we do in school will help create lasting and meaningful connections to the school content. You will always be your child's first (and best!) teacher.

Thank you for all you do to support your child (and me!)