Good Evening Parents!
You did it! A week ago you were wondering if you could do online kindergarten and now you know - you can! You did! And you did remarkably, amazingly, wonderfully well! You caught on so fast. We are seeing assignments uploaded to the right areas, and we are seeing students participate and do their work with us through the zoom camera, and in our individual assessment zoom sessions. Way to go Parents!
One of the reasons for writing a blog is that in the not so distance past, students would come home from school and their answer to the question, "What did you learn at school today?" was, "I don't know." The blog was written to give parents talking points about the themes of the week so that students would open up and share about their time at school. With At Home Learning or Distance Learning, this isn't an issue, is it? You know exactly what your child is learning because you are helping them with every assignment!
In Language Arts this week, the students listened to the story of "The Kissing Hand" and they learned that it can be hard to leave Mom and Dad and come to school but a parent's love goes with them wherever they go. Color words were presented using two classic books, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" and "The Crayon Box Who Talked". Miss Pyper our headmaster, introduced herself and read the book, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears". The students learned that there is correct order, or sequence to a story. AND the students learned that BOOM cards are really a fun way to learn - once the initial sign-up kinks were worked out!
In Math this week, the students started with "All About The Number One" and that might seem very simple except that we are building a foundation for your child's number sense, which will follow them to the next grade. There is a lot to know about the number 1 - such as it represents an amount, one block. It's not a letter, it doesn't make a sound like a phonogram. When counting, numbers have order, they make sense - one is followed by two. The students learned how to put the number one in a ten frame, a number line, and a tally mark. They drew one object and learned that we write the number one from the top down. The students recognized and sorted objects into categories - one and not one, to do this, they had to be able to count accurately. When you really think about it, there was a lot of learning taking place with those 'simple' math pages! AND there were BOOM cards!
In History/Geography this week, the class learned about the features of a map and about map symbols. Globes and folded paper maps (and Google Maps) are used to tell us location and the planet Earth is made up of 7 continents and 5 oceans.
In Science this week, the students matched up pets with their homes and listened to different types of animal noises. They learned that farm animals are not pets (although some are so cute, they could be a pet) and that farmers have a lot of jobs and some farmers even grow food for us to eat,
In mid-week, we introduced Spalding by learning about the Spalding clock and how to start writing the different lines that we need to use to form phonograms. For new Kindergarten parents, Spalding can seem intimidating, but it is really easy to learn, step by step.
Just like you learned Google Classroom, you will also learn how to do Spalding with your Kindergartner.
Here are the things you need to know about Spalding:
· Spalding is taking the spoken word, learning to break it into individual sounds and writing it on paper so that it can be read.
· We will be practicing writing the lines or 'strokes' for one more week because it is vitally important that your child learn the correct way to form the phonograms.
· In a Spalding Test, points are given for the correct phonogram AND correct letter formation.
· As you are watching your child learn this skill of writing phonograms, notice how they are holding their pencil or dry erase marker, do they have a good pencil grip? How are they starting the stroke (2 on the clock or perhaps top down). If you child learns where a phonogram starts, they will never write a reversed letter.
· We will talk more about Spalding on Curriculum Night. Just start with the handwriting.
Other things:
We will be assessing reading level and sight word totals in our zoom sessions this coming week. Everyone starts where they start, there is a lot of variation in abilities coming into Kindergarten, so don't worry about this assessment. Soon your child will have access to Reading A to Z and they will have plenty of online books to practice with. It’s a great program!
We will be starting the math books on the 27th so it is important that your child has both the KA textbook and the KA Essential Math workbook, Common Core Edition. before that date.