K/1 Week 1

by | Sep 7, 2018 | In The Loop

We are so excited to have such an amazing class!  This is going to be a great year!  Please be sure to use these weekly newsletters to ask your child specific questions about the week.  These are also a good source for parents to reinforce on specific learning goals.

La lectura

This week we jumped right into learning all about the routines and rules of our robot class and our school.  The kiddos are all so eager to learn and so smiley!  I loved how we started and am very excited about all the great things we are going to do this year.

We read a great book about the first day at a new school. This book was great in that it allowed us to talk about being happy, scared, and sad about starting school and being away from our parents.

We completed many activities this week that allowed me to assess the different skills of the students. It’s amazing how much growth we will see at this age level!

Our weekly objectives were to:

  • walk the correct way with scissors and how to hold them correctly for cutting – keeping the elbowed glued to their side while moving the paper with their other  hand
  • write our names correctly, using upper and lower case letters – we will continue this practice on a regular basis in our morning binders
  • sit on the carpet during circle times and stay in our own space
  • sing LOTS of songs (this was a great opportunity for us to practice using our whisper voice and our classroom voice)
  • identify letters of the alphabet we know
  • identify letters of the alphabet that have only straight lines in the capital
  • sequence events from our story

 

Las matemáticas

This week in math we worked with our calendar routine.  The calendar routine is a big part of our number sense and we will add to this all year.

Our weekly calendar objectives were to:

  • sing the days of the week
  • count to the current day
  • use a tens frame to track the days of school
  • use a place value chart to track the days of school
  • use tallies to track the days of school
  • identify, in Spanish, numbers 1-10
  • work on number recognition and formation 1-4

 

Please point out all letters and numbers you see when out and about  (on street signs, in stores, etc.). Use every opportunity you can to have your child count things for you! Ask them to do it in English and Spanish!

 

History & Geography

This week was such a great start to what will certainly be a fabulous year. We are so excited to be teaching your children, we can already tell this will be a very special class! The K/1’s did a wonderful job of learning their way around the classroom and school. We focused on rules and routines while doing fun games and activities in class. Each student completed a First Week of School robot book, made a robot out of play-dough, and wrote about their creation using Word Wall Words.  We worked on nursery rhymes during our social studies time and learned two poems: “Roses are Red” and “Rain, Rain Go Away”.
Our objectives this week were:
• learn how to manage our supplies in our classroom and desks.
•understand how to use our daily planner, take home folder, and journal.
• practice “robot rug rules” while sitting on the carpet.
• practice cutting, writing, and coloring skills.

Working on our Robot books

Science

Next week we will begin our science unit on farms and farm animals

Spelling/Writing

We wrote about the color red in our journals.
Our Word wall words this week were: I, can, red, my, am
Please check your child’s planner daily to see which words they are learning each day.

Specialists:

Music

I’m excited to be back for a second year teaching music at SWS!
September will be an engaging month full of hands-on rhythm learning and skill development. We will review concepts and skills covered last year, and build on them with activities involving the theoretical knowledge of beat counts, notation, and time signatures brought to life with group instrument playing, rhythmic spoken word, singing, and movement.

Character Education

It was a joy to get to know your Kinder/1st grade kids this week. They are a sweet group of kids. We are focusing on manners and kindness this month (and really all year long!) and so we incorporated this into our activity on classroom rules. Then we did What’s in the Bag Wednesday where the kids have to feel a mystery object in a bag, but not peek, and then use one adjective to describe it. This week it was a golden ring, which went along with the book The Golden Rule. Treat others how you want to be treated is our quote of the month, and the book of course talked all about this. We will also have a poem each month, and this month it’s called “Manners”. We’ll practice again and again what it means to have good manners and to be kind to others!

Art

It was fun getting to know your kiddos in Art class this week! The students are learning how the Wednesday schedule works, and they did a great job transitioning from lunch to recess to bathroom break and then Art! The students learned about Portraits this week and they used some simple shapes to draw a self portrait. We also had time to draw some pictures of apples. Check out these fun drawings on the bulletin board at school. It will be fun to compare these portraits with ones that we’ll do at the end of the school year.

For the rest of September we’ll focus on the Art Elements line and color, and then we’ll make a fall landscape with a scarecrow.

Please remember that even though we use mostly “washable” art materials, it is still possible to get stains from oil pastels, paint, etc., so we suggest wearing older clothes on Wednesdays.

If you would like to help out in your child’s art class, there is a SIGN UP SHEET on the bulletin board to the left of the office. Thank you so much!