Next week I will continue assessing 2nd quarter skills as I get ready to complete report cards. This is a good time to remind everyone to continue practicing sight words at home each week. In the report card you will be getting a list of our Kindergarten sight words, as well as a checklist of how your child performed while reading them. At this time of year, you should review all of the 1st and 2nd quarter words and begin practicing the ones we have not introduced yet. Reading sight words really helps your child become a better reader. This week we began to focus on writing our names with only the first letter capitalized. Many of the students still need reminders about this. It would be great if you could work on this at home if your child is still not using only one capital letter.
Our letter of the week will be letter G. We will read books by Julia Donaldson and do some prediciting, and recalling of details. Students will also work on retelling a story with a beginning, middle, and end. At the end of the week, they will bring home the characters from the story The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Your child should retell the story to you using the stick puppets. It is important for them to be able to tell the story in order, but not important to tell you EVERYTHING that happened. They should focus on the main ideas. Being able to tell a story orally will help them to transition to writing stories with a beginning, middle, and end during Writer's Workshop.
In math we will be comparing shapes when we talk about sides, angles, and corners. The class will consider the attributes of shapes when we play a new shape game. We will also be introduced to the subtraction symbol while we work on simple subtraction problems. Students will learn about the calculator and how to do simple problems on it. It will be a fun week.
Just a reminder about winter recess. We do go out every day that it is above 5. Students need to dress for the weather. It is helpful if you label your children's hats and gloves. Everyday I have a HUGE pile of unclaimed items on my classroom floor! Most of the children can get dressed by themselves and that saves me a lot of time so thank you for working on that at home.
