Monthly/Weekly Learning

May

Wow, I can't believe we are basically in our last month of school!  We will finish up this month with our last two letters of the Alphabet and officially put together our ABC book!  We will do a little nursery rhyme unit to finish the year off, and we will continue with name writing, and phonemic awareness.  We are also starting our Green Book this month which will help prepare them for kindergarten.  We work on it whole class and it is all about handwriting and how to form letters properly.  They won't finsh it before the end of the year, so they will bring it home and can practice there.

Week of 5/4-5/8

This week we will start letter Y and continue reviewing numbers 0-10.  We will start our Green Handwriting books and have our Mother's Day Tea this week!  We also get a visit from the Sacramento Children's Museum on Tuesday which will be so fun!!

Week of 5/11-5/15

We have finally made it to our last letter of the alphabet, Z!!   We will start our Nursery Rhyme unit this week focusing on Humpty Dumpty and Hickory Dickory Dock.   We will continue with reviewing numbers, counting, name writing, and phonemic awareness.

Week of 5/18-5/22

We are officially done with our alphabet!  We will spend the next few weeks reviewing all of the letters.  We will continue our Nursery Rhymes this week with Jack and Jill and Little Miss Muffet.   We will continue with reviewing numbers, counting, name writing, and phonemic awareness.  We also have a 10 day countdown to summer craft coming home this week on Thursday!

Week of 5/26-5/29

We will continue reviewing letters, numbers, counting, name writing, and phonemic awareness.  We will finish up our Nursery Rhymes this week with Little Miss Muffet and Hey Diddle Diddle. Other than that, we are just playing!  We are enjoying our time together, relaxing, and just having fun!

At Home:

• Play rhyming games.  Nonsense words are okay!  Ex: hat, bat, sat, mat, lat, cat, dat, rat

• Play counting games and sing counting songs/rhymes

• Say names of objects, food, people, places and see if they can guess the first sound.  It isn't about the correct identification of the letter.  It is the sound only.  For example: Giraffe is spelled with a "G", but it makes the "J" sound.  We want them to identify making the "J" sound, not trying to guess what letter makes that sound.  Same thing with "cat" and "kite."  They make the same beginning sound.  It doesn't matter if they know if it is a "c" or "k" right now.  Just focus on the sound!

• Work on name activities.  You can write their name in highlighter and they can trace it.  You can write their name in crayon or marker and they can rainbow write around it with different color markers by either tracing the exact letters over and over with markers, or tracing around each letter with different color markers.  Getting them to recognize their name first is more important that getting them to write it at the moment.  You can even write down a few different words that start with the same letter as their name and see if they can guess which one is their name!

• Young kids are very sensory based.  Make sure they are getting a lot of opportunities to touch things and explore.  You can have rice buckets, playdough, kinetic sand, water play with toys and buckets, and anything they can get their hands in.  Sometimes it's messy but they need it!  Do it outside or put a towel down.  They learn through exploration and touching and they need to feel it first hand!  Also, anything that involves using their hands helps strengthen them to help them become better writers.  Work on those fine motor skills!

• The best way to teach kids about anything is through books and reading!  Read to your child every night and talk about what you see on the page. Count pictures or words on a page.  Get number books and alphabet books and have fun!  Learning is meant to be fun!