This week, we will begin with Unit 3 Lesson 1 of our literacy curriculum. This unit is cross curricular with science and your student will be learning about weather. Your student will read a variety of texts that will teach them how weather changes and the effects weather has on the environment. Your students will also be building their phonemic awareness and alphabetic principle skills. This week your students will be introduced to letter sounds of Ss and Mm. They will practice isolating and identifying initial sounds in a word as well as Onset and Rime. Onset is the initial consonant sounds before the vowel (ex: Fish. The bold and underlined is the onset). Rime is the vowel and remaining strong of letters sounds (ex: Fish. The bold and underlined is the Rime). 

This week, we will introduce a few new skills during our phonics lessons. Your students will get  to practice identifying an initial sound in a word (ex: pet → initial sound /p/) and oral blending. For example, breaking apart a word into two sounds and blending it together (/m/   /oon/  → moon). We will read some fun texts this week, which will include Stellaluna and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and we will create book themed crafts for each day. 

Reading

This will be our last week in our second unit. To finish it off, we will be reading two awesome books! Our first book is Lady with the Lamp: Florence Nightingale, a biography about Florence Nightingale. Our second book is the well-known fairytale Beauty and the Beast. While reading we will be practicing the art of summarizing and predicting. 

Writing

We reached our last letter in our Magic C section – ‘s’! After the letter s, we will begin Jumping Letters – letters that require the writer to lift their pencil and return to the paper in order to write it. Our first two Jumping Letters will be ‘i’ and ‘t’. 

Sight words

The two sight words we will be going over as a class are ‘he’ and ‘my’. These are two from our September sight words list, but we will also go over ‘has’ and ‘you’ through our decodables, which are books that only contain the sight words we’ve learned as a class. Please continue to work on sight words at home. Here are some cool ways to teach them at home. 

Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

Ever wonder what is the difference between phonological and phonemic awareness? Here is a link that addresses this difference and gives some ways to work with your kiddo on these foundational skills at home. 

At school, we will continue to practice rhyming, syllable segmentation and blending, ordering words in a sentence and letters in a word, and of course, letter recognition. 

This week we will be continuing unit 2 and continuing our work on what it means to be kind. We will be continuing looking at the importance of word order within a sentence, and then taking that one step further and looking into letter order within a specific word. We will begin looking at simple 3 letter words in order to show the students that it is important how letters are aligned in a word. We will be continuing with our Magic C letters by learning the letters g, d, and q. As a reminder, all magic C letters are letters that begin by making a letter C. If you would like to practice at home, make sure that your child is writing letters starting at the top, and going down to the bottom line, and also holding their pencil the correct way with their index finger, thumb, and middle finger. 

This week we will begin Unit 2. In Unit 2, we will practice our Word/Print Awareness skills and discuss the importance of word order within a sentence. We will read stories and poems with the theme of kindness. We want to emphasize the importance of kindness, what kindness is, and how we can spread acts of kindness. We will begin writing our “magic c” letters. All of these letters can be written by beginning with a c! The letters we will write this week are: c, o, a. If your student is writing at home, please make sure they are holding the pencil correctly (index finger, thumb and middle finger) and writing their letters from the top of the line to the bottom line. 

This will be our last week in unit 1 where we explore the big question “What is school all about?”. We will continue to introduce the letter names, shapes and sounds, and this week we will learn the letters Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. Students will also be introduced to some sight words in our decodables, including: ‘and’ and ‘go’. Last week, we worked on sight words ‘a’ and ‘the’. We will continue working on how to hold a pencil, write the letters, and rotate in centers. 

This week in literacy, we will continue to be answering the big question “What is school all about?”. We will continue to introduce the letter names, shapes and sounds, and this week we will learn the letters G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P. We will continue working on how to hold a pencil, write the letters, and rotate in centers. 

This week in literacy, we will be answering the big question, what is school all about and how we get to school. We will be introducing the names and shapes of letters: A, B, C, D, E, F. Your student will practice holding a pencil, writing letters, and rotating in centers.