It is hard to believe that we are entering September this week! I hope Distance Learning is becoming more & more manageable as the weeks progress. From my end, it looks like things are running smoothly. Students are turning in their work, showing up for Zooms, and I can see the improvement in work quality. Keep listening to the feedback I am giving to your students about ways to improve their work, as well as the praise. Parents, we are in this together, and we've got this!
Work Reminders
I wanted to remind you about a few things in the work I want to see:
- Writing should be done in pencil. Coloring/drawing should be done in crayon. I am ok with them sketching out a picture first, but color must be added to finish the picture. I have been telling students that quality kindergarten drawings have a minimum of four different colors.
- When we are doing writing, as we did this week with labeling the color word pictures, children should be encouraged to sound out the words on their own. I went over the importance of this at Back-to-School Night. In kindergarten, the focus is developing independent writers. Children need to be able to write several sentences on their own to a given topic by the end of kindergarten. If they are too focused on correct spelling, they will freeze when asked to write independently. In the classroom setting, I do not help them with spelling-- I encourage them to sound it out. Please do the same in your home.
- Name writing: The sooner your children discontinue using all capital letters when writing their names, the better. If you let this go on, it will become a very hard habit to break. Name writing is a kindergarten standard. If you see your child writing his/her name in all capital letters, encourage him/her to look at the name writing practice sheet in the Language Arts folder to see how it should look.
- Go Noodle/Movement Videos: I often play various movement videos, especially at the 11:00 Zoom. Please encourage your children to actively participate in these. The point of these videos is to get children up and moving since they are often sitting in front of iPads for a big part of the day. In the classroom, we all get up and move when I put these videos on, and I expect the same during Distance Learning.
I sent this video last week, demonstrating how to use the "multipage upload" in SeeSaw. I would really like all children to upload this way beginning this week. If your child has not been uploading his/her work this way, I have left a voice comment about this. Please review this video again with your child so that their submissions are all in one place. This week, I want each child to upload ALL their paper-pencil work, with their choiceboard checked off on the front page, as shown in the video. If there is a separate SeeSaw activity (like the Coconut tree numbers activity last week and the extra letter practice pages) those are fine to have as a separate submission. But all of the work they are taking pictures of should be submitted with the choice board. There are several reasons for this:
- SeeSaw shows me a whole class grid so that I can see who has turned in their work for the day. If your child is doing separate submissions, it doesn't show as complete on this grid.
- It is much easier for me to view your child's work all at once and give feedback on it at one time. If everyone did separate submissions, I'd have over 100 items to click on and view in SeeSaw each day.
Finally, please try and have the day's choiceboard turned in with all the uploads by the evening each day.
Small Groups Start this Week!
I will send you a separate email with information about your child's small group assignments, and when they are meeting. There are two small groups, one for language arts, and one for math. The choiceboard will have a new look this week, and I will send a video to go over this when I send out the information about your child's small groups. The first page in SeeSaw will be the schedule with which groups are meeting with me, and the second page is the choiceboard. While groups are not meeting with me, they should be working on their choiceboard activities, as we've been doing. As the year progresses, follow-up assignments to the small group meetings (specific to your child's group) will be added to the schedule. The Zoom meeting ID will be the same as it is for our whole-class meetings.
In Class This Week:
- We will introduce the letters Ee & Ff
- We will cover numbers 6-9
- We will begin introducing sight words! Our first two sight words are I and a.
- We will be looking at shapes in our math workbook and matching them up.
- We will continue with color words black, brown, orange, and pink.
- Reminder that we have no school this Friday, September 4th or Monday, September 7th.
