JANUARY 2010 PRE-K AND K NEWSLETTER

                Happy New Year from the Upstairs Teachers!  Winter is in full swing and the new year has brought a great deal of fun, learning and many new experiences to all of our Ridge Hill friends.  Your children have worked on creating birdhouses and feeders, snowflakes, snowpeople and many other open ended artistic creations at the art table as well as explored patterns with numbers, pictures and letters.  They studied penguins extensively and took care of their eggs and learned to walk like a penguin!  They watched and timed snow melting and freezing again and used magnifiers to examine individual snow crystals.  The students wrote about their hopes for the new year and their dreams following a study of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  The playground has been a winter wonderland and being outside with friends is great fun.  We are truly amazed at how independent the children have become with the ‘getting ready for outdoor fun’ procedure…snowpants, hat, coat, mittens, boots….etc…  Thank you for always supplying your children with the necessary gear each day so we can get outside when the weather allows!

                In the Pre-Kindergarten the students have returned to their familiar groups; Alligators, Bumblebees and Caterpillars and new material is being introduced daily while a review of previously taught skills continues.  Reading lowercase letters and matching them with their uppercase partners, reading and writing numbers into the teens and rhyming word families have been areas of focus during group time.  Pre-reading and phonemic awareness activities continue daily as well as counting to the 100th day of school.  In our HWT journals we worked on letters R, K, and A and finished up January with a review of number writing.  Reversals of 2 and 5 are common at this stage and correct practice is important so please continue to work on these tricky numbers at home to support this emerging skill.  Many of Pre-K children enjoy bringing a sight-word reader book home to practice and then returning the book to school and reading the book to their classmates.  Many children memorize the book and call this “reading.”  This is a great step towards ‘real reading’ and should be encouraged.  Ask your child to point to each word as he/she reads to support left to right reading and text awareness.  “Reading” the pictures is another wonderful way to interpret and understand a story and is also very appropriate for four and five year olds at the pre-reading stage of development.

The Kindergarten class enjoyed learning about electricity in January.  It was a lot of fun making a clock work using a potato!  In February, we will conclude electricity by making our own lights, the children are very excited about this activity.  It was amazing to see how well each child read to the class in January – thank you so much for working on their books each week at home.  Please be sure to help your child jot down the words that were tricky and easy, this is helping when identifying sounds and letter combinations that are difficult.  I am very pleased to see how well the children are doing in their sight word recognition, they are so proud of themselves.  Our number scrolls have been a lot of fun, we have several children already on their way to 200 and beyond!!  The excitement as they write the higher numbers is wonderful – they look forward to writing in them each week.  During February, we will be focusing a lot more on independent writing, this is a skill we have been doing orally but not so much on paper.  I am excited to see how much they are able to do all on their own – I am sure they will amaze me!!  The children have also been working very hard in their HWT journals - we are very close to finishing!  They all have been working very hard on writing the HWT way - it shows in their work!

                Throughout February we will be learning about career choices and important community members.  If you would like to come and share a story or activity with the children about what you do each day while they are busy at school it would greatly enhance our study.  Please schedule a time to come in to the classroom at any time during the month.  No idea is too simple.  Our 100th day celebration is coming soon and information about the exact day of the celebration will be distributed shortly.  On the day of the celebration we would like each child to bring something that represents the number 100 - it could be a bag filled with 100 pompoms or a poster with 100 stickers on it.  Your child will share these representations of 100 with the class so please engage your child in the counting and creation of the visual so that he/she is able to articulate how/why he/she chose to make 100 in that way.  A Valentine’s Day celebration will take place on Monday, February 8^th and Tuesday, February 9th.  We ask that if your child will be distributing Valentine cards that day he/she brings in 45 cards (this number represents all am/pm children in both K and Pre-K) and signs only his/her name and not address them individually to friends to make distribution easier for your child.  Please be reminded that many children suffer from allergies so please do not send in food items that contain allergens for distribution.  It is our shortest month but is already full of fun learning and activities!