Dojo. We can message each other through Class Dojo in real time. I also keep you informed about what is
happening as needed. I will also send you pictures of your child at work and at play learning all year. It is a
great way to work as a team with children, teacher and family involvement. Please join today!
Our days are jam packed! We start each day with a morning meeting. Then we are off to a Writers’
Workshop where they are drawing helpful pictures and adding labels to their pictures across several pages to
tell a small moments story. We are drawing lines to write sentence words below our pictures. At this point we
are relying heavily on an alphabet chart with picture clues from one of our daily morning meeting activities to
stretch out sounds we hear in each syllable. They are off to a great start.
We have lots of movement breaks, because kindergarteners need to move. We enjoy a Readers Workshop
where children rotate through learning stations we have used in whole group and small group lessons that are
now independent practice activities. We do a great deal of hands on activities to practice letter sounds,
phonemic awareness and sight word recognition. Most days we have 4-6 learning stations throughout each day.
Math, Science and social studies are frequently integrated into our morning lessons. Up to this point we have
focused on number recognition, ordering and building sets 0-5 as well as counting to 100. We are focusing on
teaching others about ourselves and our families. Soon we extend this to our neighborhood and our community.
We are working on developing our executive functioning skills through exploratory play. Each day the children
plan what they wish to do later in the day. They write a play plan with a helpful picture, add an important label
and they are beginning to stretch out a sentence. Then at the end of each day they remember their plan and
begin and stay in the center they chose.
Kindergarten is where fun and learning never ends,
Mrs. Duperre:
The weeks are flying by here in Kindergarten! Your children are off to a great start! They are continuing
to learn all the routines and rules here at HMS. They are also learning to be kind, safe and busy each day.
During our reading time we are focusing on learning early reading strategies to help us become better
readers. Some of these strategies are, looking at pictures, pointing to words and looking for patterns in text.
These are just some examples that have been introduced already!
In math, we have just completed a unit on the numbers 0-5 and we are beginning our second unit on the
numbers 6-10. Remember your children will be learning so much more than just how to recognize these
numbers!
During our social studies time we are working on a unit titled “Me and my Community”. This week we
are finishing up learning about our roles within our families and by the end of this week and into next week we
will begin to talk about our roles within our school! Thank you to those of you who have helped make this unit
so much fun by completing the take home projects I have asked for. (The all about “me” bags and your “family
trees”) We are having a great time sharing these together, and we are all learning so much about each other!
Don’t forget if you have any questions or concerns that you can contact me at anytime!
Mrs. Valley: “It is better to know HOW to learn than to KNOW.” -Dr. Seuss
Memorizing information is a fairly easy task for most of us. It doesn’t require much thinking and it also
doesn’t help us when we are making meaning of the world around us. Having the ability to get the information
we need to help us gain a new skill or to solve a problem is much more valuable than being able to recall
random information. Thinking about thinking and learning HOW to learn is already evident in Room 3! We
encourage making mistakes because it provides us the opportunity to learn something new. Getting kids into a
growth mindset where the 䁅ɔ