April 9th Classes Resume after Spring Break April Science Experiment Show & Tell (Weather, Plants, Oviparous Animals) April 19th Beech Creek Field Trip April 27th P.T.O. Spring Fling 1:00-5:00 May 12th Happy Mother's Day! May 16th Kindergarten Awards Assembly May 20th Massucci Talent Show - 8:00 a.m. May 22nd Puhl Talent Show - 8:00 a.m. May 24th Field Day - Last Day of School
Kindergarten Talent Shows All children will have an opportunity to present a talent. We have spent the entire year doing a variety of show-and-tell activities and your child has developed poise and confidence presenting in front of others. Please start thinking about what your child might want to do for this special event. Please let us know as soon as possible what your child would like to do in the talent show.
Intensive Phonics The children are doing an amazing job with intensive phonics. We have been challenging them with 4 and 5 letter words! We have been integrating the use of blends, digraphs, and the silent “e.” We are also working on special letter combinations such as “ill, all, ark, etc.” It is so exciting to see them applying these spelling skills in their writing. Many children are also beginning to sound out words from these phonics experiences. It is so wonderful to observe so many children crossing over the bridge to become readers!
End of the Year Testing The children will be tested on important foundation skills in the last month of school. Please review anything your child missed on the third nine weeks checklist. Please practice counting to 100 independently. Finally, please continue to work on the sight word flash cards as these words are really important to your child's success in first grade. You can always go to Resource Tab to find the skills your child will be tested on.
Really Great Reading and Happy Numbers Online Resources Please continue to play games on both programs and introduce your child to games on pbskids.org. There are many learning games incorporating their favorite characters. It is always helpful if the children learn to navigate the games at home first. We will be playing these games in class in the last months of school. Thank you for all of your support. It has made this an amazing year!
Shared Reading Update We are so excited to see how many children are attempting to read the medium and hard books! We love this program because children can work at their own levels. Some children are early-emergent readers, which means that they are comfortable reading repetitious text with picture clues. Some children are emergent readers, which means they can apply several reading strategies taught in guided reading and that they are comfortable with print that is not always predictable or repetitious. Emergent readers also know many fast words and their reading is beginning to sound fluent. Some children are fluent readers. They can read easy, medium, and hard books fluently. They know many sight words and use all of the strategies taught during guided reading lessons. They can basically attempt to read almost anything! We love watching new children cross the bridge to become fluent readers each week. Thank you for your support of shared reading! Guided Writing Your children engage in several writing activities each week. It is very exciting to see what they understand about written language through these writing samples. Please do not be concerned if some of the spelling is phonetic. We call this “kid spelling” and it is appropriate at this level. Of course, our eventual goal will be conventional spelling. There are many exceptions to phonics rules in English. Ultimately, the best spellers are those who read a lot of books! When you see the exceptions repeatedly in print, you learn to spell words correctly. The most important ingredient to your child’s Language Arts success is to love reading daily! “Go Math” Update All of our math standards have been taught and reinforced through hands-on learning centers. Take some time to add and subtract with real objects, count pennies, nickels, and dimes, estimate, count on, count by 5’s and 10’s, understand place value of a 2 digit number, compare numbers using greater than and less than symbols, and find solid shapes in the environment. We have dug deep into our common core math standards. The children were challenged to solve story problems daily. A solid number sense has been developed in each child. Present simple math problems for your child to solve. Ask them what strategies they use to solve them. Give them real objects to use to solve the problem. You will be surprised at what your child can do!