First Days in School

I am so excited to teach this 2011/2012 kindergarten class! We have such a great mix of students who are already growing into a community of learners. Thank you for all the parents who came to Curriculum Night! Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns! I am always available before and after school, and I also check my email and voicemail regularly.

What has our class been working on and what do our days look like? Right now we have been working on how to be a responsible, respectful, and safe student. I'm busy teaching our kids how to behave in school and when are the appropriate times to play/talk. Please talk to your students at home about how they should be acting in school so that we can work as a team to get our kids behaving great in class!

We have also been working on nursery rhymes for fluency and to really get kids excited about stories/reading. We will continue to work on nursery rhyme activities and hand gestures for kids to do while they say the nursery rhymes out loud. We have also been working on color words and cutting practice. We worked on pencil grip and how to properly hold scissors. All this takes TONS of practice! Please correct your child at home if you see them holding their scissors improperly or if they hold their pencil in a fist. The more you catch and correct, which is what I do in the classroom, the easier it will get for kids. Like I told a student in class who said it felt funny holding the pencil correctly, "It will take time for your hand to learn what it feels like to hold it right. The more you practice, the more your hand learns, and the less funny it will feel." :)

Looking ahead, we will be doing one letter and one number a week. This will build as time goes on and the classroom's skills get stronger. Eventually we will have two letters a week. Right now, we learned how to write a "t" and are working on what the number 1 looks like in pictures, word, and number. We want to build the kids' confidence in the classroom with successful and happy experiences and push them when they are ready to be pushed to their utmost potential!

September means different apple activities in the classroom. I will talk to kids about Johnny Appleseed, we will create apple books, and do many other activities with apples as our theme. After Labor Day weekend, we will begin our center work. Children will be in small groups in the class with kids who match in skills and I will begin to work with them in guided reading, shared reading, and writing in centers for our literacy block. We start with letters and letter sounds, build into how these letters make words, and then how words become sentences. We take it one step at a time with the goal for every child to be reading by the end of kindergarten.

Have a great long weekend! Next week, a behavior form will be stapled in every Friday Folder to let you know how your child has been performing in the classroom. The week after that, I will post a new blog.