We are more than halfway through introducing all alphabet letters via the
Fundations program and children are doing well remembering letter names,
letter sounds and letter formations. We are also working on alphabetical
order. Daily practice and drill at school and at home is benefitting the
children. Thank you for your support and please do continue with your efforts!
Now that all vowels have been taught, we are starting to work with children
on simple decoding (sounding out words) and encoding (spelling words). They
are writing labels to go along with their drawings and some children are able
to write sentences to accompany their illustrations. Your children truly are
becoming authors and illustrators! Please work on reading and writing sight
words (aka "trick" words and/or high-frequency words)so that children will be
better able to do more of their own reading and writing.
We will soon be teaching children the correct formation of numerals 0-9. As
with letter writing, please remind children that all numerals are written in
a top to bottom direction; none begin at the bottom and go up. This month,
we'll also be working on symmetry.
"What makes day and night?" is a current theme in science in November. We
will be discussing the sun as our nearest star and as a source of light and
heat and the phases of the moon. In conjunction with this theme, we will
introduce the vocabulary words: earth, planet, rotate, revolve, axis,
gravity, hemisphere, equator, sunrise, sunset, seasons, nocturnal. We'll also
talk about what people and animals do in the daytime and at night. As we get
closer to winter, we will discuss the ways that people and animals get ready
for the cold season.