Looking Forward to Next Week!

Our story for the week is about a stuffed platypus. We will begin the week with an introduction to each student's favorite stuffed toy! Please remember to send your child's stuffed bear, cat, pig or whatever with them to school on Monday! We will have a brief show and tell and later, we will use them in our math lesson.

We will also begin our reading intervention program on Monday. Depending on how your child scored on the kindergarten screening tests, he or she may receive thirty minutes of additional reading instruction. Usually, in kindergarten, we have the majority of our students in the reading intervention program at the beginning of the year. If your child is not receiving the additonal reading lessons, he or she will be actively involved in literacy centers. The centers will be things like listening to books on tape, reading games on the computer, writing center, alphabet games, making words games and other fun learning activities. This extra reading time is scheduled from 2:05-2:40.

After mentioning the time for reading intervention, I realized that I haven't told you our daily schedule! Here it is:

8:00-8:30--We arrive, listen to announcements and do our morning work.
8:30-9:00--First reading group (2 groups reading and 2 groups in centers)
9:00-9:30--Second reading group (the groups change places)
9:30-10:30--Whole Group Reading
10:30-10:50--Writing
10:50-11:05--Restroom break and wash hands for lunch
11:05-11:35--Lunch
11:35-11:45--Restroom break
11:45-12:15--Computer Lab (We do a program called Successmaker)
12:15-1:00--Math
1:00-2:00--Specials (Library, P.E., or Music)
2:05-2:40--Reading Intervention/centers
2:40-3:05--Outside or Arts/Crafts
3:05-3:15--Prepare for dismissal

You may be wondering where the Science and Social Studies times are. We will be integrating these subjects into our reading groups and whole group reading on a very regular basis.

In math, we have finished our unit on sorting. I tested everyone on Thursday and Friday and am very pleased with the results. All of my class can sort by color and shape and almost all of them can sort by size and kind. I had a few children get a little bit confused, but I will continue to review this skill and will re-test before the report cards are issued. We will begin our unit on shapes on Monday. Many of the children already know the four basic shapes, circle, square, triangle and rectangle. We will begin with circle on Monday. Tuesday, we will be studying squares. On Wednesday, we will learn about triangles. Thursday, our focus will be rectangles and on Friday, we will learn about trapezoids. The unit will continue into the beginning of the following week when we study hexagons on Tuesday.