I want to thank you all for coming out in the rain (and missing part of the Bears game) to attend our Orientation Night. We had a great turnout and I hope you found the information to be helpful. I know I talk fast and say A LOT in 25minutes but I hope my love for teaching kindergarten and enjoyment of your children was evident. I am very grateful that so many of you signed up to volunteer for learning centers, computer lab and the math binders. I truly appreciate you taking time out of your day to come in and help out. I will be sending out emails with schedules for all of the volunteer times. If you have any questions about anything else, please don't hesitate to call or email.
On Wednesday this week, your child was given a CBM test. This test was a literacy check for us to get a more complete view of your child. We will use the scores on this curriculum based measure (CBM), as well as a reading level score, to help us decide their placement for flex groups. Flex groups will get under way in the beginning of October.
To prepare for flex groups we practiced "Read to Yourself" as part of our Daily 5 program. We worked on building our stamina as we read our books in our book boxes. The kids did a great job and next week we will begin training on the "Work on Writing" part. Students will get a journal and will respond to stories they heard during the day, or write about things that interest them. You might want to have a conversation with them this weekend about topics they would be able to write about at school. We continued our jolly phonics program and completed the second set of letters. On Monday we will make our 2nd sound book to bring home. Hopefully you can take a few minutes each day to read over the sounds in both books 1 and 2 as practice.
Next week we will do our second author study (check the link on the right side of the blog). All week we will be reading and comparing books by the great author Eric Carle. Many of the students will be familiar with his books which gives us the opportunity to really explore and discuss his style of writing. We will do an Eric Carle art project too. I know the kids will LOVE it! In math we will continue working on counting, directional words, and numeracy as well begin to explore some basic shapes.
As our citizenship lessons get underway, students will learn about the I Can Problem Solve method and practice solving conflicts. We spend a lot of time in Kindergarten trying to teach the students to solve small issues on their own and point out how often it only takes letting someone know that you don't like something they are doing for them to stop!
I hope you all enjoy the weekend. Looks like fall is on its way.
