Week of January 28th - February 1st

This week we will be working extensively with rhyming and word families.

Word families are groups of words that have a common feature or pattern - they have some of the same combinations of letters in them and a similar sound. For example, at, cat, hat, and fat are a family of words with the "at" sound and letter combination in common.

We have been talking about Question Marks. The children are aware that we use them at the end of a question. We will be writing lots of questions this week. It would be great if you can practice with your child at home giving them a statement and asking if they need a period, an exclamation point or a question mark at the end!!!

On Wednesday, January 30^th, we will celebrate the 100^th day of school. The children will be involved in fun activities, and will visit the first and second grade classrooms. Do not forget your children can come to school wearing 100 items on their clothes.

This is also an early dismissal day. Students will go home at 11:45 a.m.

Valentine’s Day is coming up soon and we will be talking about Friendship and making a lot of fun activities with the children. 

This week the child in charge of donating the ingredients for Kindergarten Kafe is Alessandra Perez

The following are some of the vocabulary words we are going to be focusing on this week: rain, rat, robot, rake, rainbow, rose, raccoon, rabbit, rice, rooster, ring, rock, reindeer, rectangle, radio

This week we are going to be reading the following story books:

The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown

The Little Red Hen by Diane Muldrow

These are words that good readers may instantly recognize without having to "figure them out."

Why is it important to learn sight words?

There are two reasons why sight words are an essential component of good reading. First of all, many of these words do not sound like their spellings might suggest, so "sounding them out" would be unproductive. Also, a good reader really can't afford the time to dwell on too many words, or he may lose the speed and fluency necessary for determining the author's message.

The words we are going to be focusing on this week are the following:

Or, one, had, by, words

This is a fun game that you can play with your child at home... Create cards with sight words on them. Make some cards that say BANG. Put all cards in a can. Students take turns drawing a card and reading the word. If they get it right they may keep it. The can moves to the next person even if they get it right. If someone draws a BANG card, they must return all of their cards to the can. At the end of the game the person with the most cards wins.

You may also want to check out the following websites:

www.starfall.com

www.pbskids.org/games/index.html

We are willing to help you as parents encourage a love of reading with your children by providing good literature to be read at home. If you are interested, just let us know and we can loan some of our books to you!