In December, we will finish teaching all lower-case letters and will begin to
teach the formations of capital letters. We will also continue to work on
hearing and identifying ending consonant sounds in words, replacing initial,
medial and ending sounds to make new words and more practice will be focused
on segmenting words into individual speech sounds. These lessons, in addition
to being foundational lessons in phonics and phonemic awareness, will also
help to prepare children for another round of Aimsweb assessments in January.
Next month, we will be testing Letter Naming Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation
Fluency and Nonsense Word Fluency.
Our Kindergarten children will become "word solvers" in December and will
learn strategies of how to read unknown/unfamiliar words. They will learn to
ask themselves if what they read makes sense, if it sounds right and if it
looks right. We'll be teaching them to use picture clues; look at first
sounds in words; look across the whole word; look for patterns in text; and
to look for sight words they already know.
During Writers' Workshop this month, children will practice telling stories
with pictures; drawing their best and then moving on; retelling nursery
rhymes and reading folktales.
In Math, we will concentrate on number stories; matching dominoes(a good
Christmas present); measuring with non-standard units of measure; simple
addition and subtraction; probability; graphing favorite colors; teen numbers
and using pattern block templates.
We are still working on symmetry and talking about the ways that people and
animals transition to winter.