Week of October 21, 2019

We did a special "directed drawing" activity this week and put them in our art gallery for all to enjoy!

Reader’s Workshop

    Our focus this week was voice to print match.The children are working on pointing to words as they read them and making sure they are pointing to the word they are saying. This is a tough task for kindergartners and we will continue to work on it over the next few weeks. As the children become fluent readers they won’t need to point to the words but for now it is a great way for them to track what they are reading. We also discussed the differences between a letter and a word. The children used index cards to close around just one letter, two letters, the first letter of a word, the last letter or a word as well as whole words.

Writer’s Workshop

        Our writing is really coming along. I am amazed at how much responsibility the children are taking on during Writers’ Workshop. They are trying to sound out words and write down the corresponding letters. This is wonderful! The children are very proud of their work.

Theme Time

     With Fall coming to a close in Vermont, we took the opportunity to study apples. The children were amazed at the results of our apple taste taste. Please check out the graph we created to see the results. The children made apple patterns, learned about the star in the center of an apple as well as the parts of an apple.

Math Lessons

   As we continue on our journey of learning numbers to 20 we also incorporated some pattern work with shapes and apples. The children have learned that in order to be a pattern something must repeat at least once. We have also explored growing patterns. Check out the math page of this blog for pictures of our patterns. Patterns are a great thing to practice at home. The children can make patterns out of coins, cereal, blocks...

Morning Meeting

GREETING: I Have, Who Has

(with shapes)

ACTIVITY: Buzz (a counting game)

Snack Time

   With Halloween comes candy. Please do not send in any candy for snack time. Our snack is around 9:00 in the morning and having sugar that early tends to make the rest of our day very unproductive. Please help your child by keeping the candy for an at home treat. Thank you!

Week of October 14, 2019

Reader’s Workshop

   Although we will continue to work on rhyming throughout the year, we have finished up our unit on that subject this week. The children should continue to practice finding rhyming words for given words and making up rhyming pairs. This is a skill that will help a lot when learning to read.

Writer’s Workshop

        This week the children continued their work on narrative writing. They have some great story ideas of things that have happened in their lives that they can write about. At this point they are writing stories that are at least three pages long. They are working on creating a beginning, a middle and an end to their stories.

Self Help Skills

    Eventually, winter will arrive whether we want it to or not. That means lots of zipping, buttoning and tying will be going on in kindergarten. Please help your child by having him/her practice zipping/buttoning their own jacket and tying their own shoes. This makes changing into and out of our snow clothes much less frustrating. If they start practicing now...they may have it under control by the time the snow flies. Thank you!

Open House

     Thank you to everyone for coming to Open House last night. I know the children were super excited to show off all of their hard work to their families.

Morning Meeting

GREETING: Willaby Wollaby

ACTIVITY: Rhyming Memory

Math Lessons

  We are working on 2 dimensional shapes in kindergarten (circle, triangle, square, rectangle, oval, hexagon, trapezoid and rhombus). The children have been working on naming the shapes as well as drawing the shapes.

November 1st is an early release day. The children will be dismissed at 11:30. Lunch will be served on that day. Bag lunches are available for purchase in the cafeteria.

Week of October 7, 2019

Fire Safety Goodies

Reader’s Workshop

   The children are starting to become masters of rhyming. They are making up their own rhymes as well as coming up with rhyming words to go along with words that others give them. Rhyming is a big part of learning to read so this would be a great skill to continue to work on at home.

Writer’s Workshop

    This week the children continued working on writing stories about themselves. They did a fantastic job! They can’t wait to share their work with you at Open House on October 16th.

Theme Time

       This week we finished up some of our color/rainbow activities. Please check out the science and global citizenship page in our class blog for some photos of our “Color Week” and our color word songs.

Halloween Candy Donations

   The town is collecting candy to give to residents in the village to pass out on Halloween. There will be a collection spot in the school lobby during Open House on Oct. 16th. Please consider bringing a bag of candy with you to Open House to donate to this cause.

Open House

      Open House will be held on October 16th at C.E.S. This is a chance for you to come back to school with your kindergartner in the evening from 6:00-7:00 and check out all of the wonderful things he/she has been working on. Your kindergartner will be your tour guide. I will not be doing any of the talking that night. Your kindergartner will be showing you all around the classroom and the school.

I will be sending home a Parent/Teacher sign up sheet next week. Conference time will be the time that we can talk about your child’s strengths and things he/she is working on at school. Open House is such a busy night we will not be able to talk about how your child is doing in kindergarten. We will save that for Parent/Teacher Conferences.

      

Fire Safety Day

     Today was Fire Safety Day! The kindergartners had a great time talking to the fire fighters and learning all about fire safety. Ask your child about what they learned from the fire fighters today.

Morning Meeting

GREETING: Rhyming Cards

ACTIVITY: Rhyming activities

Math Lessons

   We have continued our work with number identification as well as number writing. Our number writing is certainly moving along. Please have your child practice writing his/her numbers at home. It would be a huge help. We are also adding numbers together, making graphs, sorting objects and starting to talk about patterns we see.

Week of September 30, 2019

Hanging out with friends in kindergarten!!!!

Reader’s Workshop

   We worked on rhyming this week during Readers Workshop. The children listened to many rhyming stories and helped put the rhyming words into the text. I think their favorite rhyming story this week was The Hungry Thing. The children listened to the story and tried to figure out what the Hungry Thing wanted to eat based on the rhyming words he was using in the story.

Writer’s Workshop

   The children are learning how knowing letter sounds can help them with their writing. We worked on stretching out words this week in order to hear as many of the sounds as we could and writing those letters down on paper to make words. At this point in the year, the children are using what we call “kid spelling”. They are writing the sounds they hear and know for words they want to write.

Theme Time

        This week we spent time talking about colors and rainbows. The children loved seeing all of their friends dressed in the same color. We had a great time making rainbows with food coloring with Mrs. Horton as well as seeing how you can make a rainbow with a CD and light. Check out our science page for our color songs that we learned this week.

Math Lessons

   This week we worked with graphing and counting. We made graphs about how many boys and girls are in our classroom and how people got to school. We are continuing to work on number formation. Many of the children can write their numbers from 0 to 10 but still confuse the direction of certain numbers (ie. they flip them around backwards). Number writing is a great thing to work on at home. Please check the mathematics page of this blog for our number rhymes to help with number formation.

Morning Meeting

GREETING: Handshakes

ACTIVITY: Color Songs (see the Science page on this blog for our color songs)

Book Orders

   In your child's home/school folder, you will find the October book orders. If you would like to place an order, fill out the back of the book order form (with your child’s name) and send your order and payment back to school by October 11th. You may pay with cash or a check made out to Scholastic Book Clubs. You may order online if you would like at www.scholastic.com with our class code which is DVTHH. When ordering online, you pay with a credit card.

****There is also a Scholastic Book Fair flyer. CES will be holding their annual book fair starting at the end of next week. The book fair will be held in the music room before school, after school and during Open House.****

Week of September 23, 2019

We met Mattie, Maisy and Cheddar this week. They are the CES reading dogs. The children will have a chance to read to them on Thursdays this year.

**** Please be sure to check the other pages in this blog for updates!****

 Fundations = new letters introduced

Writers Workshop = new muscle/sight words introduced

Important Dates = schedule changes for each month

Reader’s Workshop

We started our rhyming work this week with a great

start incorporating nursery rhymes into Readers Workshop. Your child is bringing home a packet of nursery rhymes that we practiced this week. The nursery rhymes may be kept at home for your child to practice over the next few weeks. I am asking the children to use their pointer finger to point to each word as he/she reads in order to keep track of where they are and to focus more closely on the words. Please have your child point to the words as they practice at home.

Writer’s Workshop

     This week the children continued working on writing  stories. The children are working on the illustrations and then coming to me to help with some of the writing. Many of the children are using their letter sounds to try to write words on their own. Fantastic!!! It was great to see the children so excited about writing.

Fundations

We have introduced the letters c, a, o, d, g and q in the past few weeks. Please make sure you check the Fundations page of this blog every week to see which letters we reviewed and which new letters were introduced. Here is a video of the children using their letter and sign language knowledge.

Morning Meeting
Greeting: Name Cards
Activity: The Please and Thank You Song

Theme Time

        We have continued our work on creating a community of learners this week. The children are learning to be good listeners, how to take turns and how to be patient even when it is difficult. Although we will be moving onto a new focus soon, our overall focus all year with be social skills and how to interact appropriately with others.

 Skill Review

     It is great to review skills at home. Teaching children is a group effort and it will take all of us. At home, your child could be working on letter names and sounds, writing letters and words, writing numbers, counting and writing muscle words. You will always find the skills we are  working on in this class blog. The review will help those skills stick so that further learning is not made more difficult.

Color Week

Next week is color week in kindergarten. We are asking the children to wear a specific color on each day of the week. If your child does not have anything to wear of a certain color, please do not worry about it. Please note we have added yellow to Tuesday...Wednesday is school picture day.

Monday – red

Tuesday – orange and/or yellow

Wednesday – School Picture Day

Thursday – green

Friday – blue/purple

Math Lessons

   We continued our work on numeracy this week. We are starting with the basic skills for numbers 0 to 10. We have learned how to form the numbers when writing, counting forward and backward, number combinations, finger patterns as well as number quantity.