K1 Prep 7-10-18

I love teaching young learners.  They had so much fun this morning drawing what their family looks like when they go swimming.  We're already getting better at holding our pencils correctly and our drawing skills are so much improved from even last week.

 Our reading lessons went really smoothly today.  There are about a ZILLION skills that one must master when they are learning to read.  You have to look at the words, focus on one letter at a time, make the sounds, use your finger to help your eyes track, listen to the sound you're making, and put it all together.  Some of the key lessons from today included:

1. When you see a letter by itself as a word we say its name (example: a, I)
2. The first letter in a sentence is capitalized and indicates the start of a sentence.
3. A sentence ends with a period - which means "stop", or "the end"
4. New sight words were added 
5. Practice with new word families (this went so much better this week)
6. CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) word practice
7. Introduction of adjectives

Here is the beginning reading lesson from today, please practice it at home if your child has a matching page in their binder.

 This week in math we're talking about 2D and 3D shapes and location words.  Today we reviewed and learned the main shape names and then played "I spy" using shape words.

 We also pulled out the shape blocks and were able to talk about the number of faces on 3D shapes.  I do this by putting stickers with faces on each face of the block.  We can only add a new sticker if we go around a corner.

Reading 101

As we start to teach kids to "sound out" words it's important to blend each sound to the next.  I can't stress enough how important it is to teach letter sounds without an added vowel after them. For example, the letter C says /c/ like /k/-at.  It does not say /cu/ like /cu/-at.  It's hard to understand from writing, but get the difference?  Cat vs. Cu-at.  Make the consonant sounds clearly without an added vowel ending and it will be so much easier to blend and read words that have any of the five vowels after a consonant. The video we took on Thursday is not very well positioned, so the audio is awesome, and my torso an feet are boring to look at.  Here is a look at a lesson from a few years ago that teaches the same concept.