Terrific Tuesday!

What a busy, great day in Kindergarten!

DIBELS

After reading the title of this section, you may be thinking, "Huh?"  :)  A few days ago we began DIBELS testing.  These tests are administered by Mrs. McCullough, our wonderful Literacy Coach/Title One teacher and her assistant.  DIBELS simply means Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills.  Translation?  How well does your child know letter names and sounds and picture/sound association? 

These tests give me a really good indicator of what your child is ready for and help me guide instruction to meet YOUR child's needs. The results will be sent home after all Kindergarteners and first graders are done testing.  Please look over them, and practice needed skills at home.  We will be doing lots of practice at school!  And of course, please feel free to ask any questions about the test or results! 

R.E.D. Folders

• Tonight your child is bringing home their first R.E.D. (Read Every Day) Folder assignment!  Inside the folder you will find the Superkids book, worksheet, comprehension questions, and reading log.  Please do the following things:
  1.  Have your child read (the first few books have no words--have them practice retelling the story to you) the book.
  2.  Complete the worksheet that goes with the book--return to school tomorrow.  Return the worksheet in your child's GREEN Creekside folder on Wednesdays.
  3.  PLEASE take a look at the sample reading questions and choose a few each time your child reads to help increase comprehension.  If your child could answer at least 3 comprehension questions, and retell the story, sign the reading log in the back of the folder.  Fill out the reading log with the title of the book, the date, and your signature indicating that your child completed these tasks. You only need to do this ONCE per book.

       4.  Return R.E.D. folder by Friday!  If your child could not        do step 3, repeat step 3 Wednesday/Thursday night for          homework.  Send the RED folder (along with the reading        log) back to school by Friday.  The book is yours to keep,        so please take it out of the RED folder.  You may want to        create a basket or other safe place to keep all the                    decodable readers in at home.  They will make great              books for your child's library at home that they can                  reread all year!

There are only Superkids books every other week, so some weeks I will send home other decodable readers in the R.E.D. folders for students to practice reading--especially for sight word practice!  If it's not a Superkids book, it won't have a worksheet, but the rest of the R.E.D. folder tasks will still apply.

My Cookbook--Cass
Today during Superkids time, we made our own Cass Cookbooks with 3 recipes inside!  The boys and girls were very excited about trying out these recipes at home!  When you try one out, feel free to take your child's picture and email it to me!  I'd love to see it, and include it on the blog!  Have fun!

Superkids
Speaking of Superkids, today we finished our Cass workbooks!  Look for those to come home later this week with all the extra Cass pages we have finished as well as a letter that describes all the activities.  Please look through those, and then you can keep everything for Cass at home.  We will finish Unit 1 (Cass) on Thursday with a Super Smart.  Super Smarts are online, non-fiction texts and videos that we read and talk about as I project it onto the big screen.  We do one Super Smart at the end of each unit.  On Friday we will meet our second Superkid!  Stay tuned to find out who it is! 

Math

Here are the skills we have been working on in math so far:

• Comparing lengths to find the same, longer, and shorter
• Identifying the following shapes: square, triangle, rectangle, trapezoid, hexagon, and rhombus
• Practiced counting objects and realizing the last number said is the number of objects in a set
• Identifying numbers 0-10

• Begin recognizing numbers 0-9 by counting, drawing tally marks, drawing objects, and filling in tens frames.  We will focus on one number per day in addition to our normal math lesson.
• We will learn the game Count and Sit.
• We will make a class graph of our birthdays to be displayed in the room all year long and a class graph our ages that will also be displayed (and changed from 5 to 6) all year long.

Sight Words

This week I am teaching the sight words: I, am.  Please make sure to practice these and make sure your child can read them!

Library Books

Yesterday your child brought home their first library check out!  Please make sure to keep these books and the blue library bag in a safe place.  Both the bag and the book need to come back to school on Mondays in order to check out new books.  Students will eventually work their way up to checking out three books!

Have a great week!