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MAY 2021
As we embark on the final month of Kindergarten, I just want to extend my deepest thanks to all of our amazing parents. It has been an incredible year with lots of challenges along the way. You and your children have shown flexibility throughout it all. These students have thrived, and I couldn't be prouder of them. May is going to be a fun month, and I will savor it all as I try to prepare myself for their departure from our class into first grade. It not be easy to say goodbye to this group! I'm hoping for hellos and hugs from them next year!
I'd like to thank the parents that sent videos in last month to go along with our Community Helpers unit. The kids really enjoyed listening, watching, and learning from you!
This week we will begin working on final assessments. Tuesday, May 4th is our official testing day, and that is when I will be asking them all about our book about Butterflies and more. Butterfly books and pages were sent home on April 30th. Please review them with your child. In addition, please refer to the Trimester Goals, your child's previous report card, and work on those quick addition and subtraction facts. Thank you!
END OF YEAR CELEBRATIONS: Due to the current situation, we will not be able to have Open House or any Kindergarten Promotion Ceremony. However, we WILL celebrate and receive certificates in class. You can look forward to receiving some of your child's work coming home this month, as well as a memory book. I will also be working on a slideshow of our incredible year and sending it to you by the end of this school year. We're all going to celebrate, but it will just look a little different. Of course, we will still make it special and memorable!
ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS: This month we will moving on to Unit 10 in Benchmark. This is all about forces and motion. It's a fun science unit, and we will be doing some fun hands-on science to go along with it. We will continue to improve our reading skills through lots of continual reading. Ball Words are a great way to help your child with reading, and the students are pretty motivated to master them. I'm hoping to hand out lots more "Brag Tags" and trophies before the end of the month! All of those Ball Word lists can be found on Google Classroom. The Benchmark songs, books, and games for Unit 10 are ready for your child to work on!
MATH: In our GoMath! workbooks we are working on Sorting/Classifying Objects. After that, we will wrap up Math with working on numbers to 30.
HELPING YOUR CHILD AT HOME
Some of the paperwork that has been going home, includes nonsense, 3-letter words, as well as some reading passages and sight word lists. Those can be practiced to strengthen your child's ability to read and spell fluently and with confidence. At this point, your child should be reading those CVC (3-letter) words more fluently, as opposed to sounding out. This takes practice, but the practice pays off!
HOMEWORK continues to be one page of Building Skills and reading for 20 minutes. The Benchmark books, songs, and games have been added for May, as a resource to be accessed at home, as well as school. Please adjust any work you do with your child at home to meet his/her individual needs at this time, and have fun!
TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES
How to get on Starfall:
Log on through clever-click Starfall
In the top right - click sign in
Then on the left of your screen is a box with email and password
password-12345
READING TIPS:
1. Taking away the "pointing finger" while reading can help with fluency. (Pointing finger handy when a text is a bit challenging.)
2. Reading certain phrases together, such as "she said" or "to the store" can help with phrasing and helps readers "sound like they are talking" (as opposed to reading choppy and robotically.)
3. Once a story is read, have your child read it again. This is when further phrasing and fluency becomes obvious and confidence is boosted!
Benchmark Books can be found online under Assignments: Decodables are those books that mainly have words that can be decoded (sounded out) and sight words. Other books are leveled for you to choose in working with your child at home.
WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON AT SCHOOL:
. READING DAILY - Benchmark Assignments & any books made in class, leveled literature
. SIGHT WORDS - See Google Classroom - Benchmark Units Throughout the Year
. BALL WORDS - Optional - These are the Dolch sight words and are an extension activity for students to practice at home. See Google Classroom for the lists.
. READING STRATEGIES: Predicting, Retelling (Beginning/Middle/End), Visualizing, Compare/Contrast, Word Families
. PARTS OF SPEECH: Noun, Pronoun, Adjectives, Verbs, Prepositions
. JOURNAL WRITING - Once a week
. PHONEMIC AWARENESS - Letter Sounds, Rhyming, Compound Words, Blending, Segmenting, Switching a beginning or ending letter of a 3-letter word to make a new word. Phonemic Awareness activities are done orally and not visually.
. SHARED READING - Responding to literature - done in class.
Math
. Go Math! - Classifying/Sorting and Numbers beyond 20
. Adding and Subtracting with automaticity
. Counting to 100 by 1's, 10's, and 5's
Science
. Hands On Explorations
. Forces & Motion
Art
. Arts Attack Lesson every other week