Saturday, January 10, 2009

Our Eighth Post -- January 10, 2009

Happy New Year Everyone! It is great to be back at school. The children were excited to see their friends again and talk about what they did over the holidays. They were also excited to get back into the regular school routine.

For the first week back, we continued with our Literacy and Math Centres that we started before the holidays. The A Class students finished these centres on Thursday, January 8th, and the B Class students will finish these centres on Monday, January 12th. Check out the Photographs link on the Kindergarten Website next weekend for information about and photographs of these new centres.

On January 8th (A Class) and January 9th (B Class), we also completed our second inferring assessment. We were thrilled with the results! After daily inferring practice through various literacy centres at school, including our guided reading centre and journal centre, the children now understand how to make an inference that makes sense and draws on information from the text as well as their own experiences. For our latest inferring activity, we introduced the children to our Snowman Rubric and had them evaluate their own inferences. We will also be using this rubric to evaluate the students' inferences on the upcoming Learning Community Day. Ask your children to tell you about the Snowman Rubric.

Throughout the first week back, we also spent a lot of time having the children segment the sounds in different words. We have been working on this difficult skill since September, and it takes a lot of practice. The children are making some remarkable improvements though. All of this practice is in preparation for us administering the Yopp Singer (a test of sound segmentation) at the end of January. More information about this test and about how you can work on developing this skill at home with your child is available under the Activities link and the B.E.A.R. Box link on the Kindergarten Website.

In math, we continued to review the concept of "perimeter" with the children. The children have been measuring the perimeter of various objects using candy canes. They know that when they measure the perimeter, they need to measure around the object. Since they are using a non-standard unit of measurement (i.e., candy canes), they need to make sure that the candy canes are close together and close to the object as they measure the perimeter. Try using different items at home to measure the perimeter of large and small objects in your house. This is a great way to have fun with math!

As you can see, it was a busy first week back, and we are sure that next week will be just as busy and just as fun!

Aviva, Courtney, and Dianne

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