Weekly Facts...

What an amazing week it has been in the classroom!  We have all settled in and are learning so many new skills!  This week during our handwriting time we worked on correctly forming the letters E, D, P, B, and R.  These are all "frog jump" letters because our pencil has to jump like a frog back to the top to form each letter.   We are also learning the sounds of these letters as well as the sounds for the letters g, c, r, m, and u during our OG time.  The key words for these letters are a goat, cat, rat, man, and up.  We have been working hard at identifying rhyming words as well as counting the number of words in a sentence during this time too.

We had a lot of fun talking about names this week and working on patterns as well when we made this Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree with each child's name on it.  We read the book in class and talked about how alphabet letters climb up a coconut tree. We have been really stressing one capital letter in each child's name and everyone is doing a great job with this skill!

Every morning we have some time to practice independent reading in class.  We have been working on building up our reading stamina- our ability to read quietly on our own.  This is a favorite activity for several of the children every day.

During math time, we have been working with pattern blocks and building patterns.  Right now, we are working on simple repeating patterns (ABAB).  We discussed how the rule of a pattern is it needs to repeat.  We also had each child create a pattern and then switched spots to extend the pattern that was in front of each child. 

Finally on Friday, we did math stations for the first time.  During this time, the children rotated through different math games that worked on number identification skills, basic adding/subtraction skills, and patterning.