News from our week of Qq!
This week was short for us and we had tribes on Tuesday for
Tu B’Shevat! The kids ate the fruits of the trees and planted parsley, we also had a Tu B’Shevat Seder in the classroom, eating and learning the brachot for each food. Again, there were many brave tasters, especially with the olives!

This week I gave our assessment for reading. I will be sending home information about your child’s particular level and the skills I will be working on. The kids have really grown in their problem solving and reading skills, it was great to see their progress!

In centers we worked on “ing” and weather books. We also had a cool science experiment that involved salt and ice cubes. These kids really love science! We worked on putting sentences together and will continue building on these skills. They really transfer into the kid’s writing.

Please continue working on the sight words with your children. It helps build their confidence so much and we use them in games in the classroom and makes them feel very proud when they know the words. When reading with your child, stop to ask them questions about the reading. What happened first? What happened in the middle? What happened last? What was your favorite part and why? These build their comprehension skills and help them understand, they’re not just reading to read words, a good reader reads to gain meaning from what the text. If you can go to the library and let them choose books that interest them, this let’s them read to you but also let’s them truly enjoy the task of reading itself.
Also, continue on working on the vowel sounds with them, some students are still confusing them, ask your child what sounds they make, /a/e/i/o/u.
In addition to reviewing the silent “e” rule, we introduced the rule about two vowels. Ask them to sing you the song about when two vowels go walking…this is a great remembering technique to help them in their independent problem solving. We will continue to reinforce these rules daily.

In science, we made crystals! The kids loved this. They made predictions about what the outcome would be and graphed our ideas, then we went back looked at our graph again to find out how close we were to the true outcomes. The crystal designs are on our classroom bulletin board, come in and see them, they’re beautiful!

I attended a state wide Kindergarten conference Thursday and Friday and got some wonderful ideas. I’ll be implementing them in the classroom this semester and I know the kids will get as excited about them as I already am!

We’ll be continuing to talk about weather through the next two weeks, what a perfect time to do it with all the crazy changes we’ve had…

Have a great week!