Week of January 9th-13th

“Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

We read about and discussed some of the important points of Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts and achievements. We read two big books that hopefully explained the importance of this week’s observance of Martin Luther King Jr. It is amazing and also emotional to hear students respond to the unfairness of former laws and the inequality of races in our past.

Throughout this week I was able to meet with students individually and in small groups assessing their progress thus far. Assessments will continue in the upcoming week as well.

It is soon to be what I consider a prime growth period in kindergarten…usually early February through April I see the most growth occur within students. Unfortunately, this week it proved to be a time for pushing limits and expectations in our classroom. Students had a hard time keeping indoor/quiet voice levels during work times. In both reading and writing workshops students showed less effort and were easily distracted by other students. Please know that I value and depend on our classroom environment to be a place of learning. You may hear that more cards are being pulled this coming week. It may be a good time to remind your child of your expectations for his/her learning as well. Thank you

This week…
All kindergarten classrooms are starting a handwriting formation goal that we will be working on for the remainder of the year. Our purpose is to help children become absolutely fluent in writing the alphabet letters properly. This week I will be sending a chart that shows the proper writing forms to be referred to at home. Reminders such as “top to bottom” and magic c letters starting with a c are a, c, d, g, o, q and s. Your support will be greatly appreciated.

Word Study:
• We learned more about word families practicing changing the first letter in a word to create new ones.
• Worked with long vowels. Students practiced sorting common long vowel sounds with pictures.
• Practiced sight words
• Practiced –ing words

Reader’s Workshop:
• Continued working with connections.
• Listened for beginning, middle and end parts of stories. We’ve been working on this with writer’s workshop too.
• Reviewed retelling stories without looking back at the pictures. Please practice this at home with bedtime stories.




Writer’s Workshop:
• Continued writing our 3 part stories. This should have been completed sooner, but I am having difficulty building students’ writing stamina. Most students want to write one sentence or less each day. We will work to strengthen this in the upcoming weeks. I usually play classical music during this time which I will continue. However, I will also be enforcing absolute quiet during the writing portion of the workshop.
• Students reviewed lowercase letters and the need for using these in our writing. They practiced finding random capital letters in their writing and changing them to lowercase.
• Focused on using periods and the purpose for doing so. We practiced listening to sentences and incomplete sentences to tell the difference. This is something that can easily be practiced in the car or at the dinner table.
• Students wrote a short piece about their birthdays as a writing sample. I was pleased with the progress I saw with many of these. Though again we’ll be working on writing more and adding details to our stories/pieces.

Math:
Students reviewed many math skills including measurement, counting, adding, writing numbers in sequence etc. Please review papers sent home last week and coming home Monday to assist your child as needed.


Work Stations:
Using –ing at writing center, finding and stamping matching lowercase letter to capitals, highlighting the sight word “he” in our MLK Jr. book. (this book was not an easy text, but was used more for the message), practiced graphing with bags of pattern blocks, making words within –ell word family such as bell, tell, fell etc., making a snowman at the art center, solving addition problems with puzzles and more!

Looking forward to a new week of positive learning.
Upcoming dates:
January 20th- end of card marking
February 14th-Valentine’s Day party
February 20th -26th-Winter Break