I hope you were able to enjoy a break from school and your regular routine during this past week. Although I'm sure it was not what many of you had planned for Spring Break, I hope you were able to make the most of it.
This week, we launch some activities designed by the AV kindergarten team. You will see a shift in the lesson plan template from some of the activities being in the "optional category" to now being part of our required activities. However, the minutes of study remain the same-- 40 minutes of SeeSaw activities with 20 minutes of reading per day. Please also keep in mind that we have the entire week over which to spread out the SeeSaw activities. Please do not submit all SeeSaw activities on the first day! We hope this makes the activities manageable for you. There are many optional activities listed at the bottom of the template, as well. Some go onto a second page as we weren't able to keep the template to one page, so be sure to check those out if you are looking for other things to do.
Language Arts
This week's sight words are run and into. Our story this week is A Rainbow of My Own by Don Freeman. We will be taking a closer look at rainbows, and doing some writing about rainbows as well. Many of our reading activities will involve both Lexia and KidsA-Z this week. Please ensure that your children are utilizing both of these programs, as they are both geared to your child's reading level.
I am also going to begin meeting with each of my reading groups on a small group Zoom this week. You should have received these Zoom invitations last Friday, but each group will meet with me one time per week, in addition to our daily whole-class Zoom. The small group meetings will be at 9:15 one time per week, and the whole-class Zoom will continue to be at 10:00 daily. This week, I will be testing out the viability of instruction during small-group Zoom, so please try and have your child attend this 9:15 session. This week, we will be doing "Picture of the Day" during small group instruction. If there is a conflict with your child's small-group Zoom day/time, please let me know. If I do not have good participation during small group Zoom, I will not be able to move forward with instruction during this time, as it will have to be accessible to all for me to continue on this route. Both the small-group meetings and whole-class meetings will not exceed 30 minutes, and will often be shorter than that.
Math
The most important module in our entire kindergarten math program is Module 4, Number Pairs, Addition and Subtraction to 10. Therefore, we are going to continue reinforcing addition & subtraction facts through the end of the year, as well as reviewing other modules we covered. The last module in our program, Module 6, Analyzing, Comparing, and Composing Shapes is the only module that we did not get to in the classroom environment, and it is an extremely small module. You can see on your child's report card from March that the majority of areas marked with an "NA" (meaning we did not cover it yet) are in the addition & subtraction fluency areas, so that is what you will see for the remainder of the year.
With that in mind, we do feel that happynumbers.com is a great website for promoting math fact fluency. If your child has not logged onto that site yet (I see about 4 students who haven't visited the site in my teacher report), please have them working there this week, as that is the majority of our math minutes this week. This program, similar to Lexia, will adapt to the math needs of your children. I am happy to say that almost everyone in the class is already approaching the first grade level in math! To access happynumbers.com (a website, not an app)-- use Safari browser on your iPads-- please email me if you need the class code or passwords.
P.E. with Mr. Thomas
Exciting news! Mr. Thomas will be meeting with the kindergarten students each Tuesday at 1:45 for a live P.E. lesson on Zoom. A link to this meeting will be pushed out in your child's SeeSaw account.
Looking forward to our week ahead of online learning! As always, please let me know about any difficulties you are having-- I'm here to help however I can.
