Room 306 news

Hello kindergarten families,

Let me preface this first news blog with the fact that most weeks' sharing will not be nearly this long!! I feel I have so many details that may give you insight into why or how we do things so that you can be a partner with me for your child's learning. You truly are the first and best teacher your child has!

We had a busy week in our room. I'm happy to say that students are beginning to settle into some of our classroom routines. We made a chart of one of our important routines...carpet time. We learned that we should walk quietly to a spot on the carpet, sit criss cross with our hands to ourselves, keep our eyes on the speaker (whether it be a student or teacher) and listen carefully. The listening part is the tough one for us at this time. Please take a few moments this week to check in with your child on his/her listening. I often ask why they're at school and they cheerfully reply "for learning". Next I ask what my job is here and they reply "to teach". I explain a lot about how we learn and ways our brains work best. We sometimes do quick exercises such as blowing up our pretend balloons to get our brains ready to learn. I also repeat to students throughout the week that if they aren't listening then they are missing out on learning.

Our learning focuses have been on letters, different types of print such as charts, books and poems. Also learning a variety of songs and movements, numbers & counting. Ask your child how we blasted off on our countdown to zero song and then ate animal crackers to count down to zero.

Name of the day is an activity your child will participate with daily. Each day (usually MOn.-Fri.) I hold up one name from our class. We've already practiced recognizing names in many ways so children try to guess who's name it is by looking at the first letter and getting their mouth ready for the sound it makes. Once we know the name, we do a cheer calling out each letter, we count the letters, rhyme the name, clap the syllables in the name, check to see if the sounds in the name have letters to represent them or even if their are silent letters in the name. Next we ask that child a few questions and record the responses on a chart having the children help me spell the words with the sounds we hear (we call this sound spelling). Finally, on our easel I demonstrate how to properly form each letter of the name (teaching correct handwriting forms). To go along with properly writing the name I teach how to draw a person with all his/her features. Children later get to write that child's name correctly and draw a portrait for him/her. These are placed into a folder and sent home with that particular child.

We just skimmed the surface on handwriting letters and numbers, but in the coming weeks you will begin to notice your child forming these more efficiently. As you watch your child write, please remind them of the top to bottom rule when writing letters and numbers. Learning to write these the correct way in kindergarten will save your child a lot of frustration and time in the long run. Also, it is important for you to know that the way your child writes these letters directly correlates to later reading successes. Therefore starting (or changing) your child's handwriting practices is a high priority this year.

You may hear your child talk about Mr. Franke. He is Dublin's speech pathologist, but he does spend some time in kindergarten classrooms each week supplementing lessons on phonemic awareness (sounds) and other parts of language connected to literacy.

Friday afternoon many students earned their 5th sticker for the week by keeping a green or yellow card each day. Those students were rewarded with the privilege of picking out a prize. Other students were close and may earn their 5th sticker this coming week and they too will get a prize. At this time of year the goal is 5, but as the year progresses I raise the carrot a bit and stretch out the number of stickers it takes to take from our prize box. Please continue to encourage your child to listen, follow directions and rules. Oh, rules...ours are simple...Be safe, be kind & be a hard worker.

Below are photos of classmates playing at free choice time. During this time children can choose to do just about anything within reason in our room (Marble works, play dough, cars, Little Pet Shop, blocks, gear building, white boards, writing center, magnets etc).This is most often their favorite time of day. Presently we will have free choice once or twice a day, but as students adjust further to our kindergarten routines our goal is to fill it more with academic learning. However, I continue to value free choice for social and language learning throughout the year. In addition to a free choice period at the end of most days, we'll try to put some play into our work stations (beginning later this fall) such as creating a grocery store in the house or students planning a birthday party or such for stuffed animals writing invitations and more.




Poetry and large texts on charts or sentence strips helps us study letters, sounds, words, sentences as a group sharing one piece of writing for all to see. Often students enjoy using pointers to read familiar poems such as this one. We use the pictures to help us and try following along with pointers moving for each word. Claire was excited to show me that she could now read each line of our "September Good Morning" poem with a pointer.



Making books for our classroom library is always fun and rewarding to students. We are on our third class book and because they are about our classmates and simple for us to read at this time they build confidence in beginning readers.



Students are working on tracking print daily. When we are able to match our voice to the print our eyes and fingers are looking at, we are tracking print. Your child should have brought home the At School (paper) book and the "Good Morning" song sheet we practiced reading this week. With the paper book we also focused on using pictures to prepare us for the words. At this time students are not expected to know the words, but use the pattern of the text along with the picture to attempt to read/track and sometimes read from memory .We also practice tracking with the alphabet chart and pointer seen above. There is a song I play that has a soft catchy tune to help teach the letter sounds. I explain that as they use the pointer to track their brains will be learning the letter symbol that goes with that sound.


We read several new books this week including the big book version of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. We connected many of our letter/word studies this week to the 26 letters and their various sounds and forms. We posted tricky letters and sounds to help us learn those few difficult letters such as the type font a or the way y doesn't say "wa", but "ya" instead. We recite the alphabet daily both forward and backward with a song. Students should now understand that we use letters to build words such as our names which we've also spent much time with throughout the week. Additionally, we created a coconut tree of torn paper and had to unscramble the letters of our names on stickers to put up in our trees (fun!). You probably also saw other sticker trees come home that were used to count and record a number.

Some of the other books we enjoyed this week were Kevin Henkes' Chrysanthemum and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse, . More great titles were: My Friends, If you give a mouse a cookie and my personal favorite Leo the Late Bloomer. This book flows into a wonderful conversation we have about blooming. In the story Leo writes, reads, speaks etc. much later than his friends, but in the end he is able to do all that others have achieved before him. We discuss how we all bloom at different times in different areas. Some of your children informed me that they indeed had already bloomed in many ways!

Quick reminders:
* P.E. class on Wed.-Fri...Please be sure your child has tennis shoes on these days.
* Please consider joining our PTA
*If your child is buying a hot lunch check to be sure s/he knows this and also can tell me his/her lunch choice in the morning. Each day I take attendance/lunch count by calling out "good morning ____" and s/he responds with "good morning, I brought my lunch" or "good morning I am buying ______ (such as corn dogs).
*NO School September 29th (Rosh Hashanah)
*If you haven't signed up for a conference yet, please stop in to the room to do so:)
*If your child has accidentally taken home his/her name tag or folders others than the daily folder, please help him/her return them.

I apologize, but bullets don't work well on this blog site. I'm used to being able to publish almost any layout with Microsoft office, but the blog is a bit more restrictive. For instance I wasn't able to underline tites. If any of you are experienced bloggers, please feel free to pass on tips.

Thanks for reading!
It's going to be a great year!