November 2020

 I can't believe how fast this year is flying by! Kindergartners are loving coming to school and the transition to four days a week has been so positive for everyone. Our routines are changing a bit as the weather changes, but we are still finding time to be in the forest every day for an hour or so in the morning. It has been fun to watch students get so much more involved in their play and exploration as their relationships have grown stronger through the weeks. 

We made a shift to move our phonological awareness and phonics time to the morning, before we head up to our forest classroom. This is a time we work on producing rhymes, listening for beginning and final sounds, blending and segmenting syllables, and learning letter names and sounds. This is my first year implementing the Heggerty program from the beginning of the year to work on the phonological awareness skills, and I am already seeing how much it is going to help kids with their reading and writing this year! 

This schedule shift has allowed us to start a daily writer's workshop practice in the afternoon. The beginning of this workshop is so much about the routines of telling stories, working independently, drawing to tell a story, and beginning to label our pictures. We are starting this a little later than we do in a typical year, and students are eager to do this work! 

In math we have a good routine going. Students move through six stations during the week, working on numbers 1-10, and working with me practicing numeral writing. They love playing games and they are learning the math skills as they do it! This week we began a new Monday routine of solving word problems! Students are learning how to solve word problems by drawing a picture to show how they solved the problem, and writing a number sentence (equation) to match the problem.

This year we are especially focused on social/emotional learning (SEL) for our students. While this has been more of a focus in the last couple of years, this year it feels more important than ever. We use a program called Second Step as a sequence to follow. We just finished the first unit of skills for learning (how to listen, focus attention, self talk, etc). Unit 2 focuses on empathy- identifying feelings, accidents, and caring/helping. 

In essential arts we just finished a three week rotation of guidance and library, and now we will have art (monday/tuesday) and music (thursday/friday) for three weeks.