JK/K Update - March 2018
Posted on 03/21/2018
We can’t believe that the school year is half over! We have been engaged in learning important skills and concepts over the last few months of junior kindergarten and kindergarten. This is what we have been learning:
Here’s what’s happening in Literacy:
All of the kindergarten classrooms are busy drawing and writing independently and through interactive writing where student and teacher share the pen to compose different messages. Children are also busy learning pre-reading skills through group shared reading of charts, poems and big books, as well as learning new literacy concepts during a literacy-focused center time called work board. Kindergarten reading groups have begun and children work with the teacher individually or in small groups to read leveled text. Additionally, the children are learning concepts such as expanding letter and sound knowledge, building words with phonograms, and learning high frequency words. Students are participating in phonemic awareness activities such as rhyming and ending sound sorts. Families at home can help strengthen the home/school connection by continuing to read every night with your child.
The junior kindergarten classroom is busy telling stories and acting them out. We are hard at work drawing stories in our drawing books and we are beginning to label and write sentences for our stories. We are also working on beginning sounds, rhyming and uppercase/lowercase letter matching.
Here’s what happening in Math:
In math we are studying numbers to 100. We are learning to count to 100 by 1’s, and skip count by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s. Skip-counting is a skill that can help children connect many mathematics topics. It is a shorter way to count objects in groups. Skip-counting leads to addition and later the study of multiplication, number patterns, and functions. Children are also exploring the basics of place value, the foundation of our number system. As they explore numbers to 100 with concrete models, children learn to count by 10’s and use groups of tens and ones to represent and name these greater numbers. Students begin to understand two-digit numbers and compare magnitudes. They discover patterns within the hundred’s chart and practice counting skills they will use the rest of their lives!
Junior Kindergarten is busy counting, learning more and less, measuring, writing numbers and practicing sorting objects by their different attributes. We are also learning about patterns.
Here’s what’s happening in Science/Social Studies:
The children have been learning about animals in winter around the world, and hibernation. We have also been learning about our five senses by reading informational texts and learning concepts through hands-on activities. Some of the holidays we have learned about recently are New Year’s Eve, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day, the 100th day of school, and President’s Day.
Junior Kindergarten has been busy baking and learning about nutrition in addition to learning about all the different holidays.