December 25-January 5: Christmas Vacation
These past two weeks have been full of Christmas excitement and fun filled days of learning in Kindergarten!
My favorite time of day continues to be Daily 5. I love to see the children choose their activity and work on them independently. The last two weeks we have been using our iPads for listening to reading. There are two options: one is RAZ kids. This has digital leveled books for your child to listen to, read on their own and then take a quiz to check for understanding. The other option is listening to a book read on iTunes and following along with a real book in their hands. Both options are quite popular.
I love working with small guided reading groups to work on letter sounds and reading books. We are working on two reading strategies. One is two look at the picture in the book for clues when we get to a word we don’t know. The other is to look at the first letter of the word and make that sound. Sounding out full words is still tricky, so starting with the first letter is a great place to start.
In Phonics we have practiced stretching out words to listen to letter sounds. We practice with CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant). When we say the word slowly, we then write down the letter sounds we here to spell out the word. After we write it down, we read it again. This is a great thing to practice at home and even in the car. Think of words like hat, cat, sit, hit, etc. The class is loving it! They have already noticed words that rhyme are also spelled the same at the end 🙂
In Math we noticed that when we add number by 1, it goes in counting order. We are getting really good at counting by 5s and 10s. We continue to practice writing numbers and adding and subtracting numbers under 10.
We had so much fun at the Jingle Jog! I can’t believe how fast the kids were running! I appreciate their excitement and it was fun to have a day in pajamas 🙂
In Writing Workshop we are just introducing pattern books. These are books that each sentence starts with the same phrase such as “I like” or “I see”. We will begin writing pattern books in January.
Our Bible focus has been on the first Christmas. After completing the nativity, it was fun to retell the story. We have been enjoying different picture books that tell the story of Jesus’ birth.
Our poetry continues to build on our word wall words. The kids enjoy hunting for the word wall words in the poem and illustrating it. Here are the word wall words we have learned:
a, at, and, am, come, go, here, I, is, look, like, me, see, the this, up and we.