October 4th ~ 8th

It was certainly a beautiful weekend and I hope you enjoyed some sunshine and fun!
We will begin focusing on one letter per week, working with things like letter sounds and proper letter formation. Each week will also include various literacy concepts to reinforce early reading skills. Our letter this week is "Mm" and this letter will be the focus during show-and-tell on Thursday. We will work with rhyming words ~ hearing and producing them, as well as interactive writing where the kids and I share the pen as we put our thoughts in written form. We will read the story, "Cat's Colors" and we will continue to work with color words. We will write in our journals as we explore letters, words, and literacy concepts. Phonics readers are small reproducible books that contain the concepts we are working on each week. We will begin reading these books together this week and the children will keep these book in their book boxes for browsing during our classroom library literacy center.

We are beginning to work with high frequency words, or sight words. These words appear often in print and they are words we want early readers to immediately recognize to enhance fluency and comprehension. Our first word wall words are "like" and "is".

Math ~ We are beginning the study of individual numbers and will work with the numbers 1-5. We will practice counting, early addition and subtraction, as well as proper number formation. We will begin math journals this week and will use these journals to reinforce math concepts we are learning. I will share these with you during our first parent/teacher conference time in early November.

Poetry Binders ~ Each week we will add 1-2 poems to our poetry binders and we will search for letters and words. These poems contain familiar text and will provide a great collection of poems and nursery rhymes for summer reading.

Art ~ The children will create a fall tree with leaves created by finger painting.

Scholastic Book Order ~ I am enclosing our first Scholastic Book Order of the year in the Wednesday Watch this week. This provides a wonderful opportunity to purchase inexpensive books to bolster your home library. The children love to receive new books and I encourage you to read with your child for 20-minutes each evening. This models fluent reading and encourages a love for books and reading. Review the order forms and return them by Tuesday October 12th with checks made payable to Scholastic. Book orders generally arrive within 2 weeks.

We will meet with our Buddy Class again this week and the children are really looking forward to it. It is so fun to have a connection with some of the "big kids" on the other wing of our building.

Friday is individual picture day ~ so remember to return the picture packets and send your child to school with a bright smile!

Have a great week ~ thank you for sharing your little treasure with me each day!