Upcoming Events/Mark your calendars:
- Tuesday, September 16: we will attend 8am Mass.
What’s Due:
- Hot lunch orders: Order now!
- Name writing: continue to turn in the name writing pages I sent home last week.
- House pages: If you haven’t already turned in your family’s page, please do so by next week! If you need a new house page, just reach out and we’d be happy to get you a new one. Remember, please fill the house page with pictures, words and stickers that help us see why your family ROCKS! Please only cover one side and make sure it’s the side with your child’s name. We hope to start sending a complete class house book home by next week. Below is an example:
This Week:
PBIS: Students attended their first PBIS assembly on Friday. At St. Cletus, we say the acronym stands for Positive Behavior In School. In order to encourage positive behavior, we focus on three character traits, and as a staff work hard to point out when students are demonstrating those three specific character traits: “be respectful, be responsible and be compassionate.” When students demonstrate these values, they are being true St. Cletus CARDINALS! Starting next week, when students are caught displaying any one of these values, they will get a ticket. These tickets will be collected and saved here at school. Once a month, the PBIS store will “open” and students will be able to trade their PBIS tickets in for a small prize. This is a way to encourage positive behavior in our school. Students can earn tickets from their classroom teachers, specials teachers, or any grown-up in the building! Let’s go cardinals!
iReady: We finished the iReady “diagnostic” this past week. What is iReady? i-Ready is an online program for reading and math that helps determine the needs of students, personalize their learning, and monitor progress throughout the school year. i-Ready consists of two parts: the Diagnostic and Personalized Instruction. Students take 3 “diagnostics” each year–fall, winter and spring, one in MATH and then the other in READING. The iReady Diagnostic is an adaptive assessment that adjusts its questions based on the responses of students. Each item a student sees is individualized based on their answer to the previous question. For example, a series of correct answers will result in slightly harder questions, while a series of incorrect answers will yield slightly easier questions. The purpose of the iReady Diagnostic is to determine how to best support student learning.
Once a student completes the Fall/beginning of the school year iReady Diagnostic, they will be assigned online instruction to support their progress in mastering each skill. iReady Personalized Instruction provides students with lessons based on their individual skill level and needs, so they can learn at their own pace. Students are encouraged to pass 2 lessons each week in both reading and math. My job as their teacher includes monitoring their progress and using the weekly data I’m given to differentiate my instruciton to meet student needs. If I formally assessed each student every week with all skills, my time to TEACH would be more limited. Instead, I can use the data I get from iReady as ONE type of assessment to help me understand student needs and drive my instruction. For me, the main purpose of iReady is not to teach, but provide me with valuable data that I can then use with each student.
Click HERE for more information on iReady!
Next Week:
Language Arts:
- Fundations: So far, we’ve introduced:
t, top, /t/
b, bat, /b/
f, fun, /f/
n, nut, /n/
Next week, I will introduce: m, man, /m/, i, itch, /i/ and r, rat, /r/
Remember, we are ONLY working on LOWERCASE formation right now in Fundations. Each letter is introduced as “letter-keyword-sound”. Here is what tha tsouds like and how the students recite it each day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYhKyXCs7Ug
During Fundations, formation will be explicitly taught for each lower case letter using the following language: Sky line (top), plane line (dashed), “grass line” (under the plane line) and “worm line” (bottom).
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- Name writing: We will continue to practice name writing at school. Please continue to practice at home as well and turn those pages in. Please help your child: 1.) write with a pencil, 2.) write with 1 capital letter, the rest lowercase, 3.) use the Fundations lines.
- Journal writing: We will begin journaling which will start with students learning to draw pictures with crayons, and then we will work together to “stretch” words and “write the sounds we hear.” We will write with all lowercase letters. We will always encourage lowercase letters since it’s really hard to break the habit of writing in all capital letters. The purpose of journaling right now will be to practice the skills of “writing the sounds we hear,” and drawing details pictures with crayons.
- Poetry journal: We have started our poetry journals! Each Thursday, students will get their flashlight pointers out and will practice reading and singing the different songs and poems in their journals. These are all songs/poems that we’ve practice reciting in our pocket chart. The first song we illustrated was, “I am special.” The next song we will illustrate is, “Friend, I will remember you…”Poetry journals will help students with left to right tracking and understanding that letters make up words and words make up sentences. When they read and sing their poetry journals, they really feel like READERS!
- Phonemic awareness: Phonemic awareness is the oral manipulation of sounds. We spend about 10 minutes doing phonemic awareness exercises each day. Right now we are focused on beginning sounds, rhyming and breaking up compound words. We will continue this next week. At home, please continue to practice isolating beginning sounds: “Pass the c-c-c arrots. What does ‘carrots’ begin with?”
Math:
We will begin our “into Math” workbooks next week!
- Number writing: I have no introduced all number poems 1-9. It is SO important to get the formation of numbers down before we start getting into comparing, adding, subtracting. If forming a number is difficult for a child, it becomes very distracting and takes away from any other math skill. Please refer to our Number Poems for how to help your child at home!
- Number recognition 1-10. Recognizing numbers 1-10. Counting a group of objects and answering “how many,” within 10.
- Ten frame practice: we will continue to practice representing numbers 1-10 on a ten frame with counters and also recognizing amounts on a ten frame. When students are automatically able to recognize an amount without having to count, we call this “subitizing”. Below are numbers 1-10 representing on a “ten frame.” Next week, we will begin to look at a DOUBLE TEN FRAME to start working on those “tricky teen numbers,” focusing on 11-20. At home, you can practice using a ten frame. Click TenFrameWorkmatsFREEBIE-1 to print a ten frame at home and use any small manipulatives at home.
- Tally Mark practice: We will continue to work on representing numbers 1-10 with tally marks. Here is the language we use at school: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 makes a bundle! Finger space. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, circle it up! We always circle our groups of ten in kindergarten. We will begin to work on tallying numbers 11-20, noting that our “teen numbers” are always “one group of ten with ____ ones left over.”
- Counting to 30. We will practice counting daily. At home, please practice counting to 30 (or beyond)! The goal by the end of kindergarten is to count to 100 (or beyond)! A great place to practice is in the car. You can try, “I’ll say 1, you say 2” and go back and forth as high as you can.
Religion:
- We have so many SUPERSTARS in our classroom! The children are working so hard to be “God’s superstars” by doing kind things for their friends and teachers. Each time we do or say something kind, we are being one of God’s superstars! If your child comes home with a sticker, please ask him/her about it.
- We will begin to attend 8am Tuesday Mass on September 16th. Please note, on Tuesdays doors open 5 minutes early at 7:45. I encourage you to come at that earlier time if possible so we have enough time to get our belongings hung up, use the bathroom and make our way to church by 8am.
- Next week, we will start our first unit, “I am special to my friends.” We feel God’s love through our friends!