We had a great first two days of school! It has been so nice to meet all of you and your awesome kiddos! I have a wonderful group of students and I am truly looking forward to a fantastic school year!
Thank you for ALL of your generous donations! Don't forget to attend our Back to School Night Celebration on Thursday, August 18th from 4:00-7:00 at CSC. There will be food trucks, a short presentation from our director, and our kindergarten team will have a booth set up to give more information about our classes. We will also have sign-ups for room parent and volunteering in the classroom. Hope to see you there!
I will start sending home our Take-Home Folders this week. Please check this folder every day, removing any papers to stay at home, and sending it back to school every day.
We are excited for our first full week of school - we will be learning sight words, reading books, learning math, writing in our journals, and even starting homework! Please see our Homework section for more information. More information about our kindergarten homework program will also be given at Back to School night.
What Are We Learning This Week?:
Sight Words: WE, CAN, SEE, A.
Letter Team: EE (like in SEE and BEE).
Reading: We are reading many books about beginning school! We are reading books about our shapes and catching our sight words as we read. We are also learning a few reading strategies to become better readers: Make Your Finger Match the Word, Look at the Pictures, and Retell What You Just Read.
Writing: We are learning to neatly write the alphabet using correct letter formation. We are writing a book together about shapes using our sight words of the week. This week we are learning that a sentence starts with an uppercase letters and ends with a period. We are working on putting finger spaces in between our words. We are learning that our ABC Sound Chart helps us to identify sounds/letters in words. (You will also find the ABC Sound Chart on your child's Take Home Folder!!)
Leadership: At ILCS this year, we are ROARING. The acronym ROAR stands for Respect self, others, and property, Own your actions, Act safely, and Rise to servant leadership. For the next several weeks, we will be discussing the first R in class - RESPECT. We will talk about what it means to respect, as well as what it looks like. Our goal is to have students take ownership of their own behavior as we all strive to be leaders in our classroom and school.
Homework: August 15-19
Please take a moment to read each section of homework. I understand this can be very overwhelming. More information on how we run our kindergarten homework program will be coming to you soon!
Flashcards: Please make flashcards for our sight words of the week (WE, CAN, SEE, A), our letter team of the week (EE) and our word family (AN - man, can, pan, fan, etc.) Study these flashcards every day. Have your child read the word, spell the word, read the word. We will have a Spelling Test/Sentence Test on our sight words every Friday. A sentence test means we will be asking your child to write a sentence that we give them using our sight words of the week. We will not only be looking for correct spelling of our sight words, but also for an uppercase at the beginning, spaces between words, a proper punctuation at the end. An example of a sentence is, "We can see a man." It may be a good idea to have a practice Sentence Test with your child on Thursday night.
Phonemic Awareness: (These activities can be done anywhere! No paper and pencil necessary! It could be in the car, while playing catch, in the bathtub, at the dinner table, in the grocery store, etc.!) Please work with your child on the following Phonemic Awareness skills: rhyming, syllables, blending, and beginning/middle/ending sounds. A great way to practice phonemic awareness is to play word/sound games with your child. For example, you can play rhyming games by giving your child a word such as hat and ask your child to produce a new word that rhymes with hat. Continue taking turns until all words are exhausted (hat, bat, cat, fat, rat, sat, mat, splat). You can also work on helping your child identify the beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words. You can give your child a word, or show them a picture and ask what is the beginning sound in the word. For example, say the word moon and ask “What is the beginning sound you hear in the word moon?” The correct response is the sound “m”. You can also work on syllables by clapping out words. For example, the word elephant can be clapped out “el-e-phant”. Ask your child how many syllables are in the word elephant? “Three, the word elephant has three syllables”. You can work on blending by asking your child to guess the word you are saying as you say each sound one at a time (c-u-p). You can work on segmenting words by asking your child to tell you all of the sounds they hear in words. For example, in the word dog your child should say three separate sounds (d-o-g).
Reading: Reading at home is SO IMPORTANT! In a few short weeks, your child will be bringing home little books that we have been reading in class to read at home for YOU! We also have a wonderful online reading program called Smarty Ants that we will introduce in class in the weeks to come. Next week, this will become an integral part of your reading homework, as we ask that you complete 40 minutes of Smarty Ants per WEEK at home (approx. 10 minutes per day). Reading to your child is also VERY important. Children need to hear frequent fluent reading to become a reader themselves.
Writing: Our writing homework will change throughout the year and may look different for each student since each student may be at a different place developmentally. I would like all students to practice writing your name with an uppercase only at the beginning. Practice writing your ABC's both uppercase and lowercase. Your child took an ABC Writing Assessment in class and these will come home this week so you can see what your child needs to practice. You can also practice writing your sight words of the week in a short sentence. We are learning to start our letters at the TOP!
Math: Practice counting 1-30 or higher. Make number flashcards and have your child identify numbers out of order. Practice number writing - your child will take a Number Writing Assessment in class and these will also come home this week so you can see what needs to be practiced! Practice drawing shapes, identifying shapes, or even creating shapes out of play-dough, sticks, straws, etc. Ask your child to name different attributes of shapes. For example, "What shape has three sides?" or "How many vertices does a rectangle have?" *This can be done anywhere, anytime! We also have a wonderful online math program called Dreambox that we will introduce in class next week. Next week, this will become an integral part of your math homework, as we ask that you complete 40 minutes of Dreambox a week at home.
Turn-In Homework: Every week, we will only have ONE thing to bring back to school and turn in to the classroom. The expectation is that the rest of your homework will be done at home together. Turn-In Homework can be brought in ANY day of the week but must be turned in by Friday. Sometimes Turn-In Homework will be a special project and sometimes it will be a piece of writing. For Turn-In Homework this week, students will be sharing their Book Boxes made at home. A note about Book Boxes was sent home on Friday so that you can work on these boxes over the weekend. Please bring your book boxes ANY day this week to share with the class. Our goal is to share a few book boxes a week so that we do not have 21 book boxes to share on Friday.
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