Good Bye September!

Happy Sunday!

I hope that you are enjoying your weekend with your family!

This week was the beginning of the Stanford 10 test for Kindergarten students. We tested on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday mornings. So far the students have been tested on letter names, letter sounds, word reading and rhyming words. Monday will be our last day of testing. The students will be tested on Mathematics.

This administration of the Stanford 10 will give us a "baseline" score to help us measure student growth at the end of the year.

After the Standford 10 is complete we will begin testing kindergarten students with the TPRI test. This test will also be administered again at the end of the year. This test covers letter names, sounds, some word reading, deleting initial sounds, deleting ending sounds, listening comprehension and several other topics in language arts.

Luckily for Pre-K students- testing (other than report card testing) is over until the end of the year when they will re-take the Bracken test for growth measurement. 

This week marked our first time checking out library books! Students were able to use a "book buddy" to look for and chose a library book. Our class did a wonderful job picking books without dots on them, using two hands to find their books and speaking in complete sentences when checking their book out with Mrs. Brown. Please ensure that your child brings their book back on or before Wednesday of this week so they may check out a new one!

Mrs. Brown is our best friend in the library!

After all students checked their book out they were given about 5 minutes to read and explore their book in the classroom before bringing them home to enjoy!

Parents please remember that our library is a wonderful resource for you as well! If you are ever at Reece Academy in the morning to drop off your child, or for a meeting, you are more than welcome to stop by the library and check out books as well!

This week in class the students read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". After reading the story the students helped me to make a story chart listing the characters, setting, problems and solutions from the story.

After we completed our list the students had a blast painting their own very hungry caterpillar using watercolors! 

After all that work they were very hungry students and took a snack break!

This week the students were also introduced to their official workstation partner. Each student is paired with another student who they will work together with during workstations. I have spent the last few weeks observing students social skills and academic skills to see who they would best be paired with. Partners usually change throughout the year as individual students change and require a new partner to help them stay challenged!

Here are a few pictures of the children hard at work during workstations!

The students love working with our iPads!

Students made thank you notes in the writing center for Mason and his Mom. Mason brought in rubber ducks so that students could retell "Five Little Ducks" using props!

Sam and I'Ana were "Buddy Reading" together!

Elijah Y. in the independent reading center.

Joanita and her partner were recognizing and matching environmental print!

Anthony and Kaden are working at the computer station. Students work on Starfall.com and also may work on our PBS Kids Play program.

Over the past few years I have found that my students truly look forward to our workstations. They love having the opportunity to review skills on their own or with a partner. Because of this I have adapted my teaching so that students spend a majority of their day in workstations while I pull small groups of children to work on individualized tasks. This approach lets me give students more individualized instruction at their level while other students are working on appropriate content in FUN and ENGAGING ways.

To help bring new and fresh things to our workstations I have submitted a grant request through a wonderful charity called Donorschoose.org. Below is the link to our class project if you are interested in donating or passing the word along! I am asking for books on CD for our listening station and a program called "Hot Dots" to create a new workstation for both Pre-K and Kinder students!

Mrs. Richardson's Donorschoose Site

Donorschoose has graciously agreed to double all donations submitted when you use the promo code INSPIRE by October 3rd!

 

Kia Automotive has also agreed to fund half of the project once the other half, $233, has been donated! 

I hope you enjoyed your look into our class this week and will consider passing along our donorschoose project to others that may want to help!

-Mrs. Richardson

Testing, Testing and More Testing!

Boy am I glad that it is the weekend! This week was the last week of Bracken testing for our Pre-K students. I feel like all we did this week was testing!

Rest assured we were able to squeeze some fun learning in as well!

Our class this year LOVES to sing! You may have heard your little one singing one or two of our favorites!

Down By The Bay is one of my favorite songs from my school days! This song (and story) helps the children recognize and create rhymes. In this story we meet a whale with a polka dot tail, a fly wearing and tie and of course a goose kissing a moose!

If you hear your little one singing this song try and encourage them to create their own addition such as "Did you ever see a....cat wearing a hat?" "Did you ever see a....kangaroo with a shoe??"

Five Little Ducks is another one of our favorites! This is a fun finger rhyme that the students know by heart! We have the story version and the song version that adds a daddy duck to the story!

This week the students and I talked briefly about characters and setting. The children helped me make a list of the characters found in the story and we also described the setting of the story.

Zariyah took this great group picture for us!

These are the characters and the setting we came up with!

 After we created our chart we were able to reenact the story!

A family picture of our little ducks. :)

We had some pretty fast little ducks!

 I did video tape our final performance of "Five Little Ducks"! If I can get it uploaded I will share it with you!

Also this week we practiced, practiced and practiced our sight words over and over again! Sight words help children to become better readers! These are the sight words for the first nine weeks of school:

boy

girl

I

a

stop

red

blue

can

run

the

big

yes

like

we

no

In order for your child to have a word "mastered" they have to be able to read the word on sight (with in 3 seconds) and say it consistently correct (not guessing!). While sight words are technically only for kindergarten students....if your Pre-K student already knows all of their letter names and sounds PLEASE go ahead and start practicing these words now! It is never too early to get ahead! :)

We used popcorn to create our sight words because they should "POP!" out of our mouths!

 

When our Pre-K students saw our popcorn words they fell in love! So....

 

 

we snuck some extra fine motor practice into our day by making our names with popcorn too!

This week we also worked a lot on patterns! Pre-K students are working on "AB" patterns which would look like Yellow Block, Red Block, Yellow Block, Red Block. While kinder students are working on AB, ABB, AABB and ABC patterns.

 

 I hope you enjoyed your look into our classroom this week! I will leave you with some important information for the upcoming week!

****Kindergarten students will be taking the Stanford 10 test this week. We will take the test next week and again at the end of the year to measure growth in learning. Please make sure that your kindergarten student come to school each day as it will be very difficult to make up missed sections.****

 

Please refer to this handout from the Friday Folders for further information!

Please consider becoming a member of our PTO. The PTO sponsors several of our field trips through out the year by paying for transportation or other fees that would otherwise raise the cost or cancel field trips for our students!

If you are interested in either of these products Scholastic Books or Highlights Magazine please fill out and return the forms in your child's Friday Folder. Our classroom receives special prizes and free books for all orders sent in!

Even if you are not interested in the Highlights Magazine, please sign and return the form so I may send it in for free prizes!

 Enjoy the rest of your weekend! And I hope to see all of my Kindergarten families Tuesday night at Parent Night!

(Pre-K Parent night will be later in the year!)

-Mrs. Richardson

Chicka Chicka 123

I hope this weekend is treating you well! We are relaxing well in the Richardson home!

We had yet another busy and fun week in room #12.

Bracken testing has begun at Reece Academy. All Pre-K students are being tested to get a "baseline" score. We will re-test each student again at the end of the year using the same test so that we may measure the growth they have made this year.

We had our first visit to the library this week to meet Mrs. Brown, the Information Literacy Specialist. Mrs. Brown taught us how to care for our library books and how to check out a book. Next Thursday the children will have a review on how to treat library books and how to check out a book. The following Thursday will then be the first time they are able to bring a book home!

In the classroom this week we were.....

 COO COO for coconuts!

Kindergarten students:

Created AB patterns with coconuts alternating between orange and brown.

They finished their patterns so quickly- and they looked great!

 Practiced number order by placing numbered trees in order from 0-10 and then placing the correct number of coconuts in each tree!

Working hard!

Johnathan took his time and made perfect coconut trees!

Reviewed simple addition and subtraction by solving simple equations.

Zariyah finishing her subtraction problems on her trees.

Practiced counting and number recognition with Numbers 1-100.    

Apples with the numbers 1-100 were mixed up and the students first sorted them by 10's and then placed them in order from 1-100!

There were so proud of themselves when they finished!

Reviewed writing a complete sentence that starts with a capital letter, has finger spaces between its words and ends with a punctuation mark.



Writing sentences that begin with a capital letter, have finger spaces and end with a punctuation mark!

Mason write "I went to the museum." I love how his picture matches his sentence!



Pre-K students:

Learned how to properly hold and use scissors to create coconut leaves.

                               

Practiced 1 to 1 correspondence by placing the correct number of coconuts in a numbered tree.

Practiced writing their first and last names daily!

Practiced working in groups of two.  

Needless to say we were VERY busy this week and really earned our Friday Funday!

We have our projector up and running and used it for the first time on Friday!

 

I hope you enjoyed a peek into our class and are ready for the next update!

-Mrs. Richardson

P.S.- Kindergarten students will bring home their first homework assignment of the year on Tuesday! Pre-K students will bring home their Name Folders starting Monday so that they can practice writing their names nightly! :)