Busy Week Ahead:)

Hello Parents,

I hope everyone was able to get outside and enjoy the beautiful Fall weekend we just had.  We have a busy week ahead of us in kindergarten.  Our week is going to be filled with excitement as we kick-off color week and continue to observe our outside world and the quickly changing seasons.  

The schedule for color week is below:   

Monday (Oct. 7) RED day

Tues. (Oct. 8) ORANGE day

Wed. (Oct. 9) YELLOW day

Thurs. (Oct. 10) GREEN day

Fri. (Oct. 11) BLUE day

Mon. (Oct. 14) PURPLE day

Tues. (Oct. 15) Favorite Color Day

We will dive further into our adventures of becoming writers as we continue with Writer’s Workshop and creating our very own teaching books.  Students will begin to extend their pieces while I continue to nurture their confidence and build enthusiasm with writing.  

Unfortunately, last week we didn’t have the chance to start our sight word rings, so we will start this tomorrow (Monday).  The two main reasons sight words are an essential component of good reading is because many of these words do not sound like their spellings might suggest, so "sounding them out" would be unproductive. Also, a good reader really can't afford the time to dwell on too many words, or he may lose the speed and fluency necessary for determining the author's message.  The 100 most common words actually make up about 50% of the material we read! We can enable our students to greatly increase their reading efficiency when we teach them to read half or more of the words they encounter in a quick and automatic manner.

The first sight words we will be focusing on are:

a

is

the

can

I

in

my

see

to

we

and

Please feel free to practice these words at home or point to these words as you are reading to your children.  You will begin to realize how frequently these words show up in one children’s book.

As we are learning our sight words, we will also be focusing on rereading texts, using varying text features to assist us in reading, intonation, and sharing our stories with our learning community.

In Bridges, we will be learning about less than and greater than.  We will share counting strategies, challenge our thinking and determine the meaning of greater than and less than with manipulatives.  Ask your student comparing questions such as, “Who has less food on his/her plate?” or “Do you have a greater amount of coins in your pocket than I do?”  These questions will continue to apply their learning at school, to their learning at home.

Thank you to everyone who was able to sign-up for a mystery reader spot. We have our first "mystery" to solve this week! If there is anyone who would still like to read but can’t make a Friday morning, please let me know, I’m sure we can figure something out!

I hope everyone has a healthy and fulfilling week ahead!  If you have yet to sign up for a conference, please do so quickly, the slots are filling up fast!