The children have made a lot of progress this week on the road to becoming independent Kindergarteners. They now know and understand the rules in school and will be expected to follow them with fewer reminders and prompts from adults. They are doing really well so far. In fact, on Thursday this past week, most students made it to our blue star for Super Student behavior!
In Reading we continue to review basic academic concepts (letters, shapes, colors and following directions) with our Happily Ever After program. We are also working on hearing words in sentences and rhymes. The children are really enjoying our latest story "The Nightingale." Before you know it we will be leaping into our Superkids Reading Program and children will be assessed for the first of three times this year using the DIBELS test.
The children have also started learning how to use Literacy centers. Eventually, children will utilize several centers around the room independently while Ms. Chris (intsructional aide), Ms. Prestileo (Reading specialist) and I all work with small groups of children on reading and writing skills. Each center consists of one task that must be completed first as well as academic games and materials to chose from when they are finished this task. This past week the children explored "work tasks" and games they may encounter in our ABC center. This upcoming week they will be introduced to our Listening center and possibly our Word Work center as well. It is a big step for Kindergarteners to be able to work independently without adult assistance for short periods of time and they are doing quite well so far.
Math was challenging this past week. Not only did children learn about more and fewer but also had to recognize how many more/fewer. These pre addition and subtraction skills are not easy and we practiced many strategies for comparing groups. We will continue practicing these skills, the number zero and putting numbers in order this upcoming week.
We continued exploring the five senses this past week. A picture of our latest project exploring the sense of touch can be found on the Classroom Photos page. We will wrap up the Five Senses this week with an apple tasting activity and also learn about Johnny Appleseed in Social Studies class. We will soon move on to a brief exploration of Living and Non-Living things and then will spend October through November on some Fall science and social studies themes. I will update the Science/Social Studies page on my website soon.
I can't believe Fall is here! This first month of school went so fast. I feel that I have a good sense of the children's personalities and abilities now but they still manage to surprise me each day in some way. We have a great class and I am looking forward to the next month of school together!