A Peek At Our Week!

 I hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend and staying warm during this wintry weather! It was another busy week in Room 202. Please enjoy some of the highlights below!

Important Dates:

February 9th:

Valentine's Due

February 12th:

Valentine Exchange

Report Cards Posted on Aspen/X2

February 15th-19th:

Vacation Week

No School

Announcements:

3 Star Work

Thank you SO much for all of your support with our new 3 Star "grading" system for student work. The increase in effort and attention to detail has been AMAZING and the children's classwork has never looked better! While consistently receiving two stars was the original goal, I am blown away at all of the three star work I have seen in the last week! Please continue to encourage your child to always put their best effort into their assignments, especially as the mid-year "slump" is upon us. Thank you so much again for all of your help!

Report Cards

A friendly reminder that your child's Term 1 report card will be available for you to view on their X2 account starting this Friday, February 12th. It is important to review your child’s progress report with them and to celebrate all that they have accomplished this term! It is also a great time to discuss areas of focus or improvement. When viewing your child’s report card please remember that the skills shown on the report are what we expect our students to master by the end of Kindergarten. Being that it is only the first term, it is completely appropriate for students that are doing well to earn scores of "N" or "P" as they are working towards mastering each standard by the end of the year. After reviewing your child’s progress report, please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions that you may have! I am SO proud of each child for working very hard this term, and look forward to supporting their continued success in our second term together!

Curriculum:

Groundhog Day!

Our class had a great time celebrating Groundhog Day last week! We had fun making predictions about whether the groundhog would see his shadow, and discovered that more friends thought that we would (and they were right!). We also learned that another name for a groundhog is a whistle pig because they make a whistling sound when they sense danger.

Math

Last week in math we practiced counting and identifying numbers to 100! In addition to our whole group lessons the children enjoyed completing interactive center activities that helped them practice this skill. Center time is also a great time for us to sneak in some ST Math! A friendly reminder that ST Math is also a great way for your child to sharpen their skills during our remote Wednesdays. It is hoped that each child will spend approximately 60 minutes on ST Math each week. While we do as much as we can in the classroom, a small portion of time on the site at home would be incredibly helpful!

Reader's Workshop

In Reader's Workshop we continue to strengthen our early literacy skills by applying problem solving strategies to unknown words. Last week the readers practiced using all of the letters in a word (not just the first one or two) when decoding. We also previewed each new page in the books that we read and located known sight words before reading. In addition to these two skills the class also practiced reading words with beginning blends such as sled, crab, and tree.

Fundations

Last week in Fundations we continued to practice reading CVC words such as cat, pig, and rug. The children were also provided with extra exposure to the sight/snap words it, at, and up. To extend this practice we discussed how it and at can be found in bigger words such as fit, sit, bit, and cat, hat, and mat. We learned that these types of words are called word families!

The students above are working hard during literacy center time! Last week's centers included listening center (on chrome books), write the room with beginning blends, and word work which challenged the students to make works in the "at" word family.

Writing

Our "How To" unit continued last week as the class worked hard to teach others to complete various tasks step by step. As a result of last week's lessons the children learned how to include elaboration and comparisons in their work, as well as picture and act out each step of their "How To" in order to insure their directions were clear and concise.

Thanks so much for taking a peek at our week! Please check back soon to see all that is new in Room 202!