We Love our Moms!

The school year is almost over.  We are continuing to do our end of the year testing.  The students are doing a great job.  I hope to be completely done by next Friday so we can get back into our normal routine. 
I hope all of the mothers got to enjoy their Mother's Day gifts we made in class.  They had a hard time keeping them a secret but did a wonderful job.  We talked about how important our parents are to us and how we should make sure to show how much we love them everyday.  Enjoy the pictures below!

Enjoy watching us make our Mother's Day gifts

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Into the Wild

Thursday April 24th we headed off to the Louisville Zoo.  The weather wasn't too bad and with a few hiccups I think the trip went pretty well.  The students had a wonderful time and continued to talk about it all day Friday.  I am so grateful to my parent volunteers who came with us on this field trip.  I have an amazing groups of kids and they're that way because of their parents.  I can't thank you enough!! To prepare for the field trip we learned about different animals at the zoo.  We colored pictures, acting out different animal sounds, and wrote about the animals we might see at the zoo. 
We have mastered 25 sight words and will be getting 5 new words on Monday.  Along with that we have been learning about ending marks.  We leave the classroom and go on "ending mark hunts" to find as many different ending marks as we can.  We do this everyday when we go to dismissal and the class has lots of fun doing it.  We have also called exclamation marks "excited marks" so that we discuss the feeling when get when we read a sentence that has on.  They are doing such a great job.  I'm proud of how many beginning Kindergarten standards we have been able to cover this year. 

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Almost to the end...

     I hope everyone had a wonderful Spring Break.  I was able to visit with family and enjoy the time off, but was very happy to get back to the routine today with the students.  We talked about all the fun things we did during our Spring Break and will be doing some independent writing on Wednesday.  I FINALLY got my phone working again and am able to show you what we've been doing the past few weeks.  I hope you enjoy the work they've been doing.  We've been having a great time!

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Reading Eggs

I have so many things to update you about!  We have another new student in our class her name is Amina and we're so happy to have her join our class.  Also I have gotten a free trial to a program called Reading Eggs.  The students started it today.  It is a computer reading program that works with them on their individual level.  The great part is they can do it at home as well.  The trial is good until May 19th and the students are having so much fun with it already.  We went to the computer lab today and work on it.  We will be using this during our center time and you can feel free to use it at home as well.  I will be sending home a paper today that has some more information as well as their username and password.  The passwords may seem a bit silly, they were given by the program.  When you log into the program click to go to the program called Reading Eggs, not Reading Eggspress that is for 7 yrs and up.  They are able to do activities and games that help with their learning.   The reason I like this program so much is because it is on their level and also gives me reports to see how they are doing with the different skills being taught.  It's another great tool that I have to help to individualize our instruction and also to have some fun while reading.  Many of the students enjoy the computer and I thought it would be nice to have an educational tool that they can use during centers.  I hope you enjoy it and if you have any questions you have my email feel free to message me! 
Here is that address again:  readingeggs.com

So many new things!

We have been busy in the Lower K class. Spring has arrived and we've been working like bees. The class has been phenomenal with learning the sight words and word families. They are finding words they know how to read in all the stories we are reading.
Along with reading we have been working so hard on our writing. Last week we created a class story about the wind. We created a predicted text of "The wind blew the" and the students finished the sentence and drew a picture. I will post pictures soon of how great they did. Right now my phone is not allowing pictures to transfer so I'm trying to get that worked out.
We also read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and created caterpillars with our fingerprints. They turned out so cute and brought Spring into the classroom.
This week we only have a 4 day week so we will be reviewing all of the sight words and word families that we've learned so far.
We are also reviewing our math concepts. The students have done an amazing job with graphing. We learned about different types of graphs and did a class graph everyday. Last week we learned about greater than or less than by turning the greater than or less than sign into an alligator mouth. The students learned that the alligator always eats the bigger number. They are doing great! We have been covering Kindergarten standards since December and I am so proud of them and how well they are progressing.
Last week we welcomed Amna to our class! She is a great addition to our class and we are so happy to have her with us. Next week we will be on Spring Break. We also have no school this Friday. I hope everyone enjoys their time off.

We're Reading!!

     This week has been full of amazing progress from all of the students.  We have mastered our first 5 sight words and the -at and -an word families.  I cannot begin to express how proud I am of my students.  They continue to amaze me every week.  I have added a small video of two of our students reading.  I would've added more, but for some reason the sound didn't record right for the others.  I'll make sure to add a video of each student over the next few posts so all parents can watch their child.  I hope you are enjoying watching your child become a reader as well.  Each day the students are so excited to learn more and grow as readers.  They're finding sight words and words that they can read in all of our stories and during center time when they go to our classroom library.  I can't wait to see how well they're doing by the end of the school year.
     As well as becoming growing readers, they're growing as writers as well!  This week we read If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss.  March is reading month, so we make sure we read at least one extra book a day.  The students have been wanting nothing but Dr. Seuss, so I thought it would be fun to do a writing activity with it.  After reading the story I asked each child to draw what type of animal they would have if they owned a zoo.  The animal could be real or make believe.  After drawing their animals I  had them write ______'s Zoo and then list what animals they had.  I did NOT help with their spelling.  I am working with them to try and sound out and "stretch" words so that they can work on their spelling.  There are stages of development that go along with writing.  As you look at the different pictures you can see how they are progressing as writers.  They were very proud to be writing on their own.  No, the spelling is not correct on all words and they are missing vowels, but this is a stage in writing.  They are doing excellent and I'm very proud of how well they are doing with their writing.  We will be doing many more writing activities as the year progresses.
     Don't forget we will be having a fundraiser dinner this Friday March 23 at the school.  There will be speakers, a comedian, and the students will be doing a small activity for everyone.  I hope to see you there.  I have said this before and will say it again.  I am very happy to be working for this school.  I have never worked with such supportive parents and amazing students.  I look forward to everyday that I get to work with them.  I hope you have a wonderful week and enjoy our pictures and video!

Here are Abdulhamid & Yunis Reading!

These are our zoo writings.

Our class hand with all our names inside.

We're Reading!

I am a very proud teacher this week, actually I am every week but I'm extra proud this week.  We started our Ready2Read program and the kids love it.  We started with 5 sight words and then reviewed the -at family.  Next week we will be learning the -an word family and continuing our 5 sight words: the, and, see, I, a.  Almost all of the students can read the 5 sight words with no hesitation.  This is wonderful!  I am so proud of them.  We started building our sight word caterpillar and did our color by sight word activity.  I did not need to help them at all!  We reviewed the color words as a class and then I let them go to finish the worksheet on their own.  They were so excited to show everyone that visited our classroom that they could read.  We created our -at word family book that they got to take home and share with their families.  I hope you enjoy reading the stories with them.  They will get one of these every week to go along with the word family they are learning.  The great thing about the books is that it also corresponds with the sight words we are covering.  I will move students up when they have no hesitation in reading the sight words.  My suggestion would be to keep them in an area so that your child can start to build a library of books that they know how to read.  Practicing daily helps them gain a love for reading and also helps them review the words that we've already learned.  Enjoy the pictures of our activities this week.

Here is our Sight Word Caterpillar 

We will keeping building him every time we get new sight words!

 

Working on our Color by Sight Words

Here is some of the graphing we've been doing in Math.

We got new centers for March and the kiddos love them!

We've been reading to our "Reading Buddies" (stuffed animals)