We are off to a great start!

We’ve made it through the first 6 days of Kindergarten!!   The children are doing well learning the morning routines and are doing them on their own now (with some reminders).  We also practiced walking outside for a fire drill and they did a wonderful job staying in a quiet line. 

All of the children seem to be adjusting well to coming to school whether on the bus or being dropped off.  On Thursday, they began the regular morning routine with the first and second graders and now wait in the gym before heading down to the classroom.  They are all doing well getting ready for dismissal at the end of the school day.  I am gradually trying to get them to be more independent with placing papers in the pockets of their folders and packing their backpacks on their own.

We have been busy learning each other’s names, practicing our cutting and gluing skills, learning the daily routines, and the expectations of school behavior.  We have also been learning the terms “before,” “after”, “alike,” and “different” in math and even started math stations on Friday and practiced counting up to 20 objects and writing numbers to 10.

I have been encouraging the children to go home each day and share one thing they have learned.  If your child has not shared what we have been doing, here are a few suggestions of what you can ask them about:

• Can you show me how you write the numbers one and two?

• Can you teach me the days of the week song?

• What does a 5 star listener look like? (I am looking for children sitting with legs crossed, hands still and in their laps, ears listening, eyes watching the speaker, and lips that are zipped)

• Who were the characters? or What was your favorite part of the books The Kissing Hand, Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten, The Wheels on the Bus, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and Fox Makes Friends?  (The underlined titles take you to read alouds of the stories).

We will be discussing much more at Open House next Thursday, September 17 so I hope you will be able to attend.  Please look for the Open House notice I sent home on Friday for more information.

Here’s a quick peek at the past week through pictures!

We LOVE the Smart Board and have used it to practice writing letters and numbers.  We even created a graph to show how many letters in our names, which gave us the opportunity to use our math words "most" and "least".

Each day during morning meeting, we read the morning message.  Here is where we will review and practice important skills and concepts.  This week we learned about punctuation marks, which we call stop signs at the beginning of Kindergarten.  Already, the children are spotting stop signs and remembering that these marks tell us it is the end of a sentence and that they need to stop and take a breath before continuing to read.

The children are already learning so much and I'm looking forward to the fun and excitement the rest of the year will bring! 



CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.3
With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.K.2.b
Recognize and name end punctuation.       

CCSS.Math.Content.K.CC.A.3
Write numbers from 0 to 20. Represent a number of objects with a written numeral 0-20 (with 0 representing a count of no objects).      

CCSS.Math.Content.K.CC.B.4.a
When counting objects, say the number names in the standard order, pairing each object with one and only one number name and each number name with one and only one object.