Hello! I apologize for missing the last couple of newsletters. Things have been extremely hectic outside of school. So let’s recap everything we have been doing this month! Get ready for a long one!
In reading we have continued to hammer in identifying the middle sounds in words. Students have been doing lots practicing pulling out the middle sound by stretching out the word. We stretch out the middle sound in order to make it more known. These middle sounds and vowels are what is trickiest for Kindergarten which is why we have been so focused on it. We also added some new sight words to the board which are words we see so often that we know them easily like ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘in’, ‘so’, etc.
We are also trying to work on our sentence writing! Some students need some more work being comfortable coming up with their own sentences, and trying their best without anyone else’s help to write the sentence. This would be a great thing to encourage them to start doing at home! Maybe find a journal or notebook that is just for them that they can use to practice writing whatever they feel like.
We introduced consonant digraphs, which is when two letters work together to make one sound. We made a chart to help remember them: sh-, th-, ch-, ph-, and wh-. The trickiest ones is ‘ch’ vs ‘sh’ and ‘ph’ vs ‘th’. Part of this is due to the way a lot of children speak, but the more we practice annunciating our words the easier this will get!
This week we also focused in on the letter Yy! The letter Yy has many different jobs and sounds that it makes, so students were asking a lot of questions about it. We learned that when the Yy is at the end of a word it can either make the long e or the long i sound.
We also have been drilling building words, decoding them, and tapping out the sounds in 4 sound words. We have been using letter cards to show students how we can replace certain letters and sounds and it changes the whole word.
For Saint Patrick’s Day we learned all about Saint Patrick and why we have a holiday named after him! We learned about clovers and shamrocks and made our own, and we also wrote a sentence about what we are lucky for! We read a story about a lucky duck who went looking for a four leaf clover to find some good luck, but realized that having some good friends would give him the good luck he wanted the whole time! It was called Lucky Ducky by Doreen Mulryan. On Saint Patrick’s Day we watched a video about Irish dance and students had a fun time trying to Irish dance themselves! We also played bingo and students got to win prizes from the prize box!
In Math, we have been wrapping up our chapter on subtraction and doing an in depth review of numbers 11-20! In order to keep these review sessions fun and interesting, we have been doing centers very often. Having manipulatives and seeing addition and subtraction sentences in many different ways makes it more and more like second nature.
We even utilized our rock box in our classroom to practice counting up to higher numbers! We have been skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s. We’ve been trying to recognize patterns in the numbers that will make it easier to remember which numbers to use.
On this page, addition and subtraction problems were mixed together!
Here is a link to two songs that Kindergarten goes absolutely nuts for, which we use to practice our skip counting:
We are also working on doing our work independently getting better at double checking our own work to make sure we aren’t making silly mistakes!
In Science, our talk of planets and the Earth has evolved into talking about the weather and plants, which only grow on Earth. We read a story by Eric Carle called the The Tiny Seed. This story shows all of the things that have to go right in order for a plant to grow fully! We also read a story from our reading curriculum books about plants that grow in the desert, which was very informative for both topics. Many students had not known what makes a desert unique, so it was a fun introduction to different environments and climates and how they affect the things that live there. We will continue learning about plants and maybe even get one of our own….stay tuned!
We also read a very wonderful book called Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty. We used this story as our new class book report and we also got to talk about what does it mean to be a scientist! As we recapped the events of the story we realized that Ada is a scientist because she observes the things around her, asks questions, and then does experiments to test out her ideas. We discussed how we can all be scientists too, even though it’s not our job!
As a supplemental tool, we have been watching the show Ask the Storybots (on Netflix Kids) every once in a while during snack time (we usually split one episode up between 2-3 days). We watched the episode about how planets are formed and now we are watching the episode about how flowers grow.
We also brought back some partner yoga, which students are getting better and better at as they get bigger! This week we also tried some guided meditation. Kindergarten learned that yoga gets our bodies ready for meditation so that it is easier for the mind to relax. Here is the one we did:
Ms. Byron came in this week to talk about the emotion of anger and how it can make our body feel. Students learned the important message that it is okay to be angry, but it is not okay to be mean! Students also learned the word empathy and that it can mean learning to figure out how other people are feeling. Kindergarten does a wonderful job of naming their feelings and comforting others who are feeling bad.
We also have been talking about gender stereotypes. Lately, students have been saying a lot of things like, “Girls can’t have big muscles,” or “Boys need to save the girls,” or “That is a boy or girl color.” Statements like this can be harmful because they give way to negative connotations about the genders, especially at this formative age. We read a book called Pink is for Boys which helped reiterate the concept that colors especially should not have a gender and that everyone can enjoy all the colors. If you would like to discuss this further with me personally, do not hesitate to reach out! I minored in Gender & Women’s Studies so this is a topic I am very passionate about and would be happy to share how it influences my teaching philosophy.
Next week is a short week due to Easter break — we will not have school on Thursday or Friday. The following Monday will be a Flexible Instruction Day! Wednesday the 31st of March is a dress down day with jeans, but students must bring in $1. Please be sure to check your student’s folders and have them complete the homework assignment by Wednesday of next week!
Please let me know if there is anything that you need from me or if you have any questions. March has been very hectic but Kindergarten is enjoying every second of it!
Thank you again for your patience and understanding.
Have a wonderful weekend!
Ms. V 🙂