What We're Learning: Letters, Sounds, and Social Studies

We have finished two more weeks of kindergarten, and we have been busy!

We're not just learning about letters, but we're learning that letters make sounds, too.  So far, we've learned 14 letters and their sounds!  Ask your child about the sounds these letters make:  a, t, b, l, f, h, p, s, u, m, r, c, g, and i.  In addition, we've been learning how to write some capital letters. So far we've practiced the "frog jump" capitals which are F, E, D, P, B, and R.  Ask your child where we start our letters, and see if they can remember why those letters are "frog jump" capitals. One of the things that these letters have in common is that they all have a straight back.  We went on a hunt to find letters that have a straight line in them.

We've been learning how to get along with others, too.  We've learned that we have to listen, talk, take turns, and make good choices when making friends. Working on knowing how to listen has been a big focus. We talk about having a whole body that listens with not just ears, but we want to show the speaker that we're looking at him or her with our eyes. Also, we want to keep our feet and hands still and our mouth quiet.

Most importantly, we want to know what the speaker has to say!  When it's our turn to talk, we want to make sure our voices are the right size (or volume) for the conversation.  We practiced when it was time to talk and when it was time to listen.

Then we learned about the importance of having class rules and taking turns.  Here we are with our class dragon taking turns:

We made a list of the times where we should take turns in school:

We've learned how to behave, or maybe what not to do, from two of our favorite characters:  David and Pigeon.  Here are the big ideas we came up with from their stories:

Here is what we thought when we talked about making good choices:

Speaking of making good choices, we talked about a way to be proactive is to make the choice to do the thing that needs to be completed:

Finally we made a promise to remember to get along with others:

Stay tuned for updates in both reading and math!