Welcome back! I hope that everyone had a wonderful winter break. It went fast, but I'm glad to be back to school. This week we began our uppercase letters. We speed through these, completing about 2 a day. We learn how to print them and review the sounds that they make. We are really starting to focus on putting letters together to form words and have been practicing by creating nonsense words as well as writing journals where I really have them practice spelling out words on their own. Nonsense words are simple cvc words, like cat, consonant/vowel/consonant, but are not real words. I make up a words like hup and then we sound out the words to see if we can correctly pronounce them. It is more challenging then sounding out real words and gives me an idea of where your children are at. Everyone seems to be catching on really quick.
We read a book called Corduroy this week. In this story a little bear, that lives in a department store, has lost his button and goes looking for it in the store at night. He never finds it, but finds a new home the next day where his new owner replaces the button. It is a loving story about accepting others for who they are. We discussed it and then wrote a journal page on where he could have originally lost his button. They children had to try to sounds out words for themselves which they did really well.
In math we are easing our way into addition. We have been playing several games together this week with adding dice together. We have been doing this on the ACTIVBoard and have been playing class vs. me.
It was a great week back.
