It's hard to believe school is out for the summer. It's been a great year! We loved the low numbers in class size this past year! Looks like we will be getting a bump up for next year. The rooms are getting painted and clean carpets.
So we won't be in the rooms working until after the 4th of July. Have a great summer vacation!
We appreciate the efforts of the families who work so hard on homework! It always starts after the Labor day weekend. Great effort!! Please get your student a journal to work on at home. They will be expected to keep journal entries from time to time.
Please always have your child well rested. By the end of the year, he/she should be able to say/recoginize all the letters, sounds, at least 60 sight words, count to 30, plane shapes, solid shapes, coins, and identify measuring devices along with ordinal numbers to 10. Students should read sentences in the decodable readers. They should be able to write their own sentence with capital letters, spaces between words and end with punctuation.
This whole paragraph applies as reference all year.
We work on skills in phonics, writing, reading comprehension and math for homework.
We hope you are are making time each evening to say letters with your student. We make regular library visits so students can begin to read or look left-to-right on pages in books. Let's start trying to get the students to better recognize the lower case letters as well as upper case. We send home 26 poem/songs for the kids to learn rhymes, punctuation and words that have that sound. We want them to learn both sounds of the vowels and g plus "y".
We will also learn several blends, silent e, and word endings.
Each day we will try to make language arts and math learning centers available to your student to complete for practice in the areas we feel your child is deficient. After centers each day there is time for quiet reading called SSR(sustained silent reading) or DEAR(Drop Everything and Read). So if your student mentions these activities, you will understand. Some students can really give great effort here, reading well in decodable readers durng this practice time! Later in the year your student must pass the STAR reading test for first grade before they can start in another program we call "Accelerated Reading". This test is timed. We will try our best to get the class academically ready for this. The librarian, Mrs. Pratt, or Mrs. Brown will enter them in the program after they have mastered the sight word list for the year. None of this is graded or mandatory. These activities are all supplemental and voluntary. Not everyone gets into AR. Mrs Pratt sticks to her rules. If the student does not finish reading our take home readers and learn sight words, they cannot take the STAR test and get in AR, sorry! This program is entirely student motivated. If they want to to do AR, they must work hard to read above and beyond the goals of kindergarten!
We use a fantastic website called,
starfall.com in the class to assist them in preparation for AR. We introduced this to the students in the computer lab. We hope you enjoy each story. In computer lab each week, we use a program called, "Island Adventures" to assist the students with phonemic awareness. They love it!
Check out Starfall.com at home. We finished all but two books from the series during the past school year.
We use a nursery rhyme unit to help students hear rhyme. Rhyme helps them to identify word families.
Once the student masters identification of rhyming words, the activities in the poem/song homework continue with learning sight words, capitalization and punctuation in sentences. The students received stars on their poem posters for rhyme work they have done in the poem folder. They will get extra bonuses for work well done! This is all done in conjunction with other homework. This is extremely important for your student if they are not hearing rhyming words yet! This is always the weekend homework.
Weekday homework directions are provided on a homework calendar and is no more that 15 minutes nightly. Homework is a continuation of what has been presented in class for practice. This will give you insight into whether the student grasped concepts presented that day. Again, homework calendar always starts after Labor Day. Some nights we send the paper home for the work to be done on. If we do not send the paper home, we still need the homework done!!
*We have a new county kindergarten assessment in its 2nd yr. called GKIDS(Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills)which will be the basis for the 1st report card. Keep that 1st report card handy!
*We are also using another assessment called DIBELS(Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills.
It is a 60 second timed tested that will measure 3 skills:
Letter Naming Fluency, Inital Sound Fluency,& Nonsense Words. We continue to do progress monitoring of these skills to chart improvement. We hope you student reaches the benchmark scores.
Please use the agendas provided by the school for communication to us about homework or personal matters which will help improve the students progress! Parents please sign the agenda somewhere on the page after you have read my notes. We ask that you supply us with emergency numbers as they change. Please make us aware of your child's mode of transportation for the rest of the year. We ask that your child always have an afternoon rest towel and snack on hand, as well as, school bag, change of clothes, and lunch money or lunchbox.
Ice cream prices have been leveled off to the price of $1.00 for each snack. We appreciate your support for this fund raiser for the school.
Hope your family will be checking out SkillsTutor for extra help on alphabet. Passwords will go out soon after school begins! We are setting up activities for your student to do soon. It will benefical for those students struggling with the alphabet and sounds. There is the direct link where you will be able to download it from! More is coming soon. http://www.achievementtech.com/go/support-
Parent Portal is an information site for upper grades. We have our own document for kindergarten provided by the state. Attendance is the only thing to check at that site. Thank you for your cooperation.
Please use my cell # to contact me in the room for emergencies. I do not check voicemail here at school often. Please pass the word to other parents that do not have computers. Of course, you may always use email.
Some students are always shy. That is why we have a time of show-n-tell periodically throughout the year.
Continue to encourage students to come to make new friends each day. Let's strive for good manners! Thanks!
I hope Mrs. Cyr and I can be partners with you in all these practices throughout the year. Remember, we are only an email or phone call away. More updates will be added. We look forward to working with your student. Oh! Have them wear layers they can come out of as the day warms up during the school year.
Cell Phone: 678-485-3449
email: susan.ray@cowetaschools.org
(Format for this current site is hard to move in.)
Please excuse the typos!
Let us know if you would consider helping us out at some of our events! If you would like to speak to the class about your occupation, just send us a note and we will work you in to the schedule. Thanks for what all your family will do preparation for each day of school.
We currently use volunteers for cutting activities and reading activities in the classroom when school starts. Class involvement makes for better communication and understanding!
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