Hello Everyone,

I'd like to apologize for this late blog post as well as for not having posted a blog last week. I have been away from school for quite a few days over the past two weeks and my blog posts got forgotten. I will do my best now to catch you up on what the students have been doing in the classroom.

This week, the children were in the very good hands of a guest/substitute teacher, Ms. Wutherick.

The students continue to work with the alphabet, learning and practicing letter recognition, formation, and sounds. I have also started to introduce many small high-frequency words into our daily Shared Reading. The letters covered this week were F, I, N and the high-frequency words were, "is, can, I, see, it, and, the."

Every day during our morning carpet and calendar time, we read 4 simple sentences as a class. Afterwards, I have the students look for and circle select words or letters in the sentences. I may say things such as: "Can you find the 4-letter word that has two vowels in it?" or "Circle two words that begin with the sound 'kuh'." We spend time talking about the sounds in certain words and where else in the room we may see these words. This may be something you will wish to do with your child during our time away from school. It can be done anywhere - in the line-up at a grocery store, looking at letters on packages, magazines, signs, etc. - while driving in the car, while reading a book with your child, etc.

In Math, our focus has been on correct number identification, formation, and subitizing. Subitizing means to quickly identify a small group of items without counting. We have also been working to identify and represent numbers through tally marks, ten frames, simple pictures, and dice. Here is an example of this work and an activity we have done in class:

With the uncertainty of the strike and how long we may be away from school, here are my suggestions for activities you may wish to do with your child, if you have time:

- Read, read, read with your child. Many children are not yet ready to read. Listening to stories and sharing a book with an older sibling or parent is a great step in developing a love of books. It can also motivate children to learn to read as they want to understand more about the books they see.

- Play simple board games and card games to practice number identification, the concepts of bigger than/ smaller than, and to develop subitizing skills.

 - Have your child practice printing daily - both uppercase and lowercase letters as well as numbers. You can make this fun by having your child use a whiteboard, playdough to form letters and numbers, markers, crayons...

I hope these suggestions help. More importantly, I hope we will all be back in the classroom and school soon.

Thank you for your continued support.

Take care,

Jennifer