Week 3

Another successful week on the books! I'm enjoying getting to know the children better, they are such great little people :) I enjoyed reading their All About Me pages, and they loved sharing them. Thank you for taking the time to help your kids fill them out!

This week, I administered the DIBELS tests to all of the children. DIBELs stands for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. These tests are nationally recognized and will be administered three times this year. At this time in the year, we administer two of the tests- First Sound Fluency (FSF) and Letter Naming Fluency (LNF).  While these scores will not predict your child's future reading ability, they help indicate where your child might need additional support in becoming a reader. When we meet for Parent Teacher Conference night, I will have your child's scores available to you. We also administered the STAR early literacy test, which students take independently on computers. Those results will also be available at parent teacher conferences.

This week we worked on recognizing the letters A-M. We read the story "The Little Engine That Could," and "Thank You Mr. Falker." I had not read "Thank You, Mr. Falker," and it was quite a tear jerker! It provided a great opportunity, though, to talk about empathy and how people learn differently. 

Our comprehension strategy focused on plot. We worked on recognizing the characters, problem, and solution in the story. These are also things you can talk about after reading a book to your child.

Thank you so much for completing and getting your child's homework back to school. Working on these basic skills at home will help your child tremendously. I create most of these worksheets myself,so it is very relevant to what we are doing in class. If your child is having trouble with the homework, or if it is taking longer than about 5-10 minutes per page, please let me know! This work is not intended to be a frustrating activity for either of you! 

In math this week, we worked on comparing and representing numbers in ten frames. We made "Name Frames," but putting the letters of our name in a ten frame. Then we counted to see how many more letters we needed to make ten.

The children are doing a wonderful job with learning their rituals and routines. Afternoons are a little tough (we're working on our stamina!), but they are doing wonderfully.

The children also got to check out our new library! It is beautiful. They will begin checking out books soon! We can also use the computer lab soon- Woo hoo!

I hope you have all had a wonderful weekend! In order to feel empathy (as we talked about in literature), I caught the cold that's being passed about :) I'm feeling better just in time for Monday! We will be going over safety procedures, like using tissues and washing hands, to help us stay safe during germ season :) I hope all your little persons are getting plenty of rest and staying healthy!  See you tomorrow!