Posted by kavery508 | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on September 15, 2013
It was nice meeting you at Open House! Thank you for taking the time to continue our partnership in your child’s education. If we missed you that night, I’ll be sending home a paper signup sheet with available slots for parent conferences on Monday of this week.
Reading This week we will launch our Daily 5 CAFE board. The board and subsequent lessons are designed to teach and practice the key components of good literacy: Comprehension; Accuracy; Fluency; and Expanding Vocabulary. Check out the elements of each that will provide a focus for direct instruction over the year: http://www.thedailycafe.com/public/1330.cfm
We will start this week by teaching the following comprehension “Fix Up Strategies” for when readers encounter unknown words: Ask what makes sense (this one is HUGE); Look for words/parts of words you know; Say the first sound(s); Get a running start by rereading the sentence up to that point (this should help kids by guessing what sounds right there); and Chunk the word (break it into parts they can read). Any one of these makes a great prompt when your child gets stuck reading at home. You’ll notice that “Sound out the whole word” isn’t on the list. That’s because that strategy comes later once students know most vowels, blends, and phonemes (for example, think of what a reader must know to sound out a word like permission).
Our vocabulary focus comes from our list of classroom rules we created together last week(see rules_13_14): 1) Be Nice 2) Be Cooperative 3) Be Responsible 4) Be Safe . We will explore the meanings of responsible, cooperate; behavior; assertion, and we will practice using them in sentences and illustrating them in our vocabulary journals.
This week our phonics focus is on hearing, reading, and writing short a words, particularly those ending in -at and -an. We will listen and hunt for them in text; play games; and of course sing songs! Here’s one of our new favorites, sung with all short a words the kids make up: “I Can’t Spell Hippopotamus” (Coots) http://lmmya.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/2/8/1428504/hippopotamus.pdf (versions of kids singing it abound at youtube.com).
We’ll also practice sight words this, can, she, see, by that come from a kindergarten mastery list known as “Popcorn words”. We expect kids to read and write them correctly, so they will be practiced each week. Here’s a game with some of them: http://www.fun4thebrain.com/English/popcornWords.html
Math We will continue to practice counting by 1s, 2s, and 5s and identifying numbers up to 100. We will also give extra practice to students learning how to make and use tallies of 5 to help count. This skill comes back often in grade one. We will also explore calendars and months of the year. Remember to work with your child (as part of math homework perhaps) so they learn their birthday (month and number), phone number, and address.
Writing As students continue to tell stories from their lives, we are learning to pay attention as listeners and to inform the author about which parts of his/her story are clear and which parts may benefit from more detail. We will learn this week to brainstorm story ideas and to get started illustrating and writing the beginning of our stories, as well as learn how to plan the stories out in a logical manner.
