News From K/1

Dear families,

We hope you enjoyed a wonderful long weekend. It was wonderful to host many of you at Curriculum Night, and if you weren’t able to attend, I’ve linked the descriptions of our academic program here. Please let us know if you have any questions!

Cannonball Monkey (our class mascot) is continuing to make their rounds. So far they have enjoyed sleeping in a comfy bunk bed, swimming in a pool of Magna-Tiles, visiting a tire shop, and meeting a cat for the first time.

Reading and Phonics

As we continued to read this week, both individually and in small groups, readers worked on

tracking. This could look many different ways for readers in different stages of development. It might look like another reader pointing to words as they are read aloud, underlining words with your finger as you read them aloud yourself, holding a popsicle stick under each line of text as you read it aloud, or visually tracking text as you read silently in your head. Read alouds this week included Sheila Rae, the Brave by Kevin Henkes and Why Do Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears? by Verna Aardema.

Readers also had small-group instruction in phonics, focusing on:

●​Phonemic awareness (rhyming, adding, deleting, substituting, and blending sounds)

●​Dictation (learning phonetic spelling rules and encoding words)

The scope and sequence we follow for dictation incorporates lots of opportunities for alphabet recognition and awareness, as well as handwriting and letter formation. The year begins with a quick review of previously learned rules (starting with c, short a, and short o) before moving on to new spelling patterns. A fun outdoor phonics activity was going on a hunt to find pieces of each other’s names and putting them together to read the name

Writing

Writers continued to find tiny seeds that could be developed into interesting and entertaining stories, using each others’ stories as models. After reading The Five Senses, we looked at photos of ourselves and described them with sensory details using adjectives or action words using verbs. A couple writers independently created surveys early in the week, which piqued the interest of other writers who became excited about creating surveys to collect others’ answers to a yes/no question. Some example questions from our workshop include: Do you like gummy bears? Who do you like better: Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker? Which do you like better: dogs or cats?

Math

Mathematicians continued to sort and group objects by size, shape, and color, as well as count them using skip counting (in 2s, 5s, and 10s). Some students worked on creating number bond stories for different numbers using bears and hula hoops to represent a number bond: “10 bears were hibernating in a den. When the bears woke up, some bears went to the field to graze on clover, and some bears went to the forest to forage for berries.” Students decided how many bears went to the field or forest to show how different numbers can be bonded together to make seven, eight, and nine (and up). Favorite math centers included sorting and counting different kinds of animals, building with pattern blocks and tallying numbers of blocks used, and dot to dot

number writing. Chefs ended the day on Friday counting and adding toppings to their apple slices.

Have a wonderful weekend!

~Elise and Nicole