elc kindergarten

Week 5 Update                                                                                                                       September 8,2012

 

Last week we introduced several new things to our classroom!  Maybe you’ve already heard from your child about the lizards hiding all around our room, our room labels and our new fishing game!  The kids seemed very excited about each of these as they were introduced.  It was great week for us all as we can almost see “the light bulb” come on in different areas with different students!  That’s what I love about Kindergarten! 

Hide and Seek Sight Words is our new game, where each morning I hide these cute little paper lizards with sight words written on them.  Many of them are found early in the day as students are unpacking and getting settled in, but some (in really good hiding places) surprise us throughout the day!  The first morning it was pretty much mass chaos as every student wanted to continue searching for lizards after the easy ones were found!  I’m trying to teach them that we can’t turn the room upside down each morning, but that I have hidden them in strategic places where they will be found throughout our day.  Perhaps you even heard about the real lizard that seemed to want to join our game!  He appeared on the outside of the window of the front door of our classroom!  See the picture below.  Anyway, this game is a great way to encourage the students to study their sight word list.  FYI, sight words are common words that don’t always fit the phonics rules we are learning and therefore cannot be “sounded out “with accuracy. They are words that we all just know by sight like “the”, “said”, “one”.  Your child has the Dolche Pre Primer list in their Frog notebook.  You may want to make flashcards of these to help your child memorize them.  When they find a lizard they are supposed to tell me what the sight word on it is.  Later we will have students keep a log by writing them down.

The students also enjoyed finding the room labels that I placed around the room.  These are just little tags with names of items on them like: door, sink, window, rug, white board, etc.  This helps connect written words with everyday objects.  They are using their phonics skills to figure them out!

Our fishing game consists of a blue container (our pond) and a couple of small bamboo fishing poles with magnets on the ends that attract the paper clips on each fish.  Right now we are fishing for upper and lower case letters, matching them up and putting them order.  The possibilities with this game are endless!  I’ll be switching out the activities regularly.

On Fun Friday, we had a great time spelling sight words with our Scrabble Cheez-Its and everyone did a great job with consonant Show and Tell! 

A Peek at the New Week

Our Sight Word for the week is “is”.  Remember to work on the sight word list in your child’s Frog Notebook at home at a pace comfortable for your child.  We are working on the long and short sounds of the vowels and focusing on the “-at” family.

This week in Math, we will be introducing and working with coins beginning with pennies, nickels and dimes.  Our Poetry recitation will be the first part of the poem,  ”Jingle in My Pocket” which will help them learn the values of the different  coins.  This poem is located in a plastic sleeve in your child’s Frog Notebook.  We will focus on the rest of the poem at a later date as we expand our money skills.  We are also beginning some work on telling time.  The students are excited about our new special clock to help us with that!  For now we are focusing on the parts of a clock and telling time to the hour.

We’re still waiting for our new handwriting materials from Handwriting Without Tears, but the initial transition to our new paper went very well.  As I stated last week, you’ll see a variety of lined papers in our activities, but this new paper will be what we use when we are concentrating on letter formation.

 

 

 

Homework                                         Week of September 10 – 14

Monday – Read in A Beka reader through circled page with date.  Return on Tuesday.

Tuesday – “at “ family worksheet

Wednesday – Math sheet 21-22

Thursday – “My Chameleon” worksheet

Poetry Recitation – “Jingle in My Pocket”

This week we are beginning a poem/song about money that will take a while to learn.  Please work on the first section at home this week.  The poem is in a sheet protector in the Frog notebook.

The written homework may all be turned in on Friday.  The sight word puzzle may be kept at home.