We had so much fun talking about monsters this week! We read many great monster books including: Go Away Big Green Monster, Where the Wild Things Are, There’s No Such Thing as Monsters, and There’s a Monster Under My Bed. We created our own Big Green Monsters, and they are decorating our hallway. I’m excited for you to see them at conferences! We also made a monster color book. It was fun to draw monsters in different colors. We did some great monster writing activities too. We used describing words to describe monsters, and we made our own monster to put under our beds. We were so busy with all of this monster fun that we didn’t get a chance to make our monster cookies this week. We’ll be making them early next week instead!
Our Jolly Phonics sounds this week were: the voiced th, qu, ou, oi, and ue. I am sending home two sets of matching games to practice the sounds at home. This is a great way to make this practice fun. We also learned more tricky words – he, she, we, me, and be. Remember that tricky words are words that don’t follow the phonics rules. We have to memorize them in order to read them. The students are bringing home a tricky word book this weekend. Please review the tricky words with your child each night just like you do with the sound book. Both books will be coming home until the end of November, so your job will be to review the sounds and the words each night. During centers this week, the students practiced writing words and letters, making words and letters with play dough, and matching initial sounds with pictures.
During math, we practiced writing numbers using salt trays (trays filled with salt – so much fun!), matching coins, and identifying patterns on a number board. During centers, the children continued to work on making patterns, counting groups of items, and writing numbers in order. We also made a really cool Halloween quilt!
As I’m sure many of your children have told you, we pretended to start the year all over this week. Tuesday was our pretend first day of school! I had many reasons for doing this. First of all, we have many new faces in our room. We welcomed a foster grandma, Grandma Elizabeth to our classroom on Monday! She helps us with many things during the morning. We also welcomed Mrs. Williamson and Mrs. Loften who help us throughout the day! All of these new faces were quite overwhelming for everyone at first, but we are easily settling into having our new teachers in our room.
Now’s the time where I have to be honest with you all – kindergarten is not always sunshine and rainbows. As with any classroom, we struggle from time to time with behavior issues, with academic issues, and with friendship issues. This was my biggest reason for starting the year all over again. We had been struggling. On Tuesday, and every other day this week, we reviewed classroom rules and expectations. We’ve talked about what it looks like to be a good friend and the difference between being a kindergartener and being in preschool or pre-k. I am so, very proud of how well the students are responding to this! The last four days in our classroom have been absolutely wonderful! The students are treating each other with more respect, they are following our rules, and many behaviors have disappeared. It’s amazing to see, and I couldn’t be happier with each child! It’s like I have a brand new class! Please encourage them to keep up the great work at home!
Our Jolly Phonics sounds this week were: the voiced th, qu, ou, oi, and ue. I am sending home two sets of matching games to practice the sounds at home. This is a great way to make this practice fun. We also learned more tricky words – he, she, we, me, and be. Remember that tricky words are words that don’t follow the phonics rules. We have to memorize them in order to read them. The students are bringing home a tricky word book this weekend. Please review the tricky words with your child each night just like you do with the sound book. Both books will be coming home until the end of November, so your job will be to review the sounds and the words each night. During centers this week, the students practiced writing words and letters, making words and letters with play dough, and matching initial sounds with pictures.
During math, we practiced writing numbers using salt trays (trays filled with salt – so much fun!), matching coins, and identifying patterns on a number board. During centers, the children continued to work on making patterns, counting groups of items, and writing numbers in order. We also made a really cool Halloween quilt!
As I’m sure many of your children have told you, we pretended to start the year all over this week. Tuesday was our pretend first day of school! I had many reasons for doing this. First of all, we have many new faces in our room. We welcomed a foster grandma, Grandma Elizabeth to our classroom on Monday! She helps us with many things during the morning. We also welcomed Mrs. Williamson and Mrs. Loften who help us throughout the day! All of these new faces were quite overwhelming for everyone at first, but we are easily settling into having our new teachers in our room.
Now’s the time where I have to be honest with you all – kindergarten is not always sunshine and rainbows. As with any classroom, we struggle from time to time with behavior issues, with academic issues, and with friendship issues. This was my biggest reason for starting the year all over again. We had been struggling. On Tuesday, and every other day this week, we reviewed classroom rules and expectations. We’ve talked about what it looks like to be a good friend and the difference between being a kindergartener and being in preschool or pre-k. I am so, very proud of how well the students are responding to this! The last four days in our classroom have been absolutely wonderful! The students are treating each other with more respect, they are following our rules, and many behaviors have disappeared. It’s amazing to see, and I couldn’t be happier with each child! It’s like I have a brand new class! Please encourage them to keep up the great work at home!