Weekly Poem

Grandparents Day 2013-2014

Week in Review!

We had a very busy, but short week here in room 26! It was so great to meet and see with all of you to discuss your child’s progress. A theme across the board is practicing sight words and numbers, over & over! An extra 5 minutes of practice at home with these skills will help your child continue forward with our second nine weeks skills.

READING:

-Our sight word this week was the word “am”.

-For morning work this week, we started practicing writing missing sight words in sentences. After the students worked on it individually, we came together and circled and wrote sight words on the ENO board using the same paper!

-The CAFÉ strategy we worked on this week was the strategy

“Retell Beginning, Middle and End”.

Summarizing a story is often used to retell, but is challenging for many kindergarten students. If it does pose a challenge, many times it is because students are trying to retell the whole story with great detail and don’t know how to cut it down to the most critical elements. This is when we step in with more modeling either with the whole group, in small groups, or one on one, depending on the number of students who need the strategy.

How can you help your child with this strategy at home?

1. When reading with your child, focus on three main parts of the story. What happened first in the story, in the middle and how did the story end. Try to not let your child get carried away with retelling fine details of the story if they are not pertinent to the outcome of the story.

2. Break it down into 3-4 pages in the story. Help your child flip to only those pages to help retell in order beginning, middle and end.

3. Before reading a familiar story, ask your child to retell it to you using the beginning, middle and end. Then read through the story and point out the parts where the story changes from the beginning to the middle to the end!

-Students have also started to use RAZ-KIDS in our classroom as an option during Read to Self. We take turns going through number order. One student each round gets to listen to stories and answer questions on the quizzes at the end during their Read to Self round for that day.

WRITING:

 

-We had a lot of fun this week in writing! We looked through our journals and picked a favorite piece that we had written so far this year to publish on our “GREAT WRITING” wall. Each student then shared his/her piece in our special “Authors and Illustrators” chair before putting it up on display in the classroom for all to see!

-The class also helped me revise my own writing on Wednesday. I had written a story about when our class went on a leaf hunt. I misspelled a few of our sight words and wrote the incorrect beginning, middle and ending sounds on a few words and the class helped me reread my writing and “fix” my errors! We talked about how they too can go back and reread their writing to make sure sight words and unknown words have all the letters needed in them!

 

 

Math:

-We continued to practice our “Number of the Day”. The class is getting really good at this! We write the number, the number word, tally marks, draw a picture, draw the dice, a number bond and a number line!

-We also started to practice showing different ways to make a number using our number stories and number bracelets. This choice is in our “Number Work” option for Daily 5 Math and if chosen, the student sits in front of our number stories and creates different ways to make numbers using the bracelets! They then repeat the way they showed the number on the bracelet for extra practice. It is quite the hit J.

 

 

CONTENT:

 

-We had an exciting week learning about the season fall and what happens to the leaves on the trees. We went on a leaf hunt, did leaf rubbings, created our very own “leaf man” after reading a story written by Lois Ehlert named Leaf Man and painted tissue paper leaves that are on display in our classroom!