Sight Words!

Hello Firstie Parents!!

Another quick update about what is happening in Room 7… We are still really enjoying having Louis le lutin visiting our room. This morning he greeted us by zip-lining through the class. Madame Byrd was worried about his safety but he made it down the zip line no problem and the kids were very excited.

We are continuing to work on sight words and are using our Sensory Table and Word Work Table to work on reading and recognizing sight words. The sight words (high frequency words that we would like to know ‘by heart’) we are working on and that you could work on at home are as follows:

-Le

-La

-Les

-Un

-Une

-Des

-Chat

-Bonjour

-Va

-Louis

-Tu

-Ami

-Me

As promised to a few parents in Parent-Teacher interviews, here are some “Sneaky No-Learning Teaching Tricks” (i.e ways to work on these sight words with your child if you are struggling to get them to sit down and do the dreaded “homework”).

Sight Word Stacks

Write a different sight word on each foam square. Then, put them all in a bag. Pair up the students and have them take turns picking a foam square out of the bag. If they can read the sight word that's on the square they get to keep it and add it to their stack. With each word they get their stack grows. If their stack of foam squares topples over they have to put them back in the bag.

Sight Word Twister:

Write out sight words and tape to Twister board. Kids spin and play as usual but must read and say the sight word they are about to put their hand or foot on.

Fly Swatting Sight Words:

This is a class favourite and we often do this to practice letter and number recognition as well. Write or type up sight words on a large sheet of paper or on small cards and spread out on the table, tape to the wall or put on the floor. Give the kids fly swatters (or just use a glove or bare hand) and say one of the sight words out loud. The kids are to find the sight word and swat it as quickly as possible. This is a great game to play with siblings or parents as opponents.

Sight Word Hockey:

Great for the boys!! Use a leftover strawberry container to create a hockey net and use bottle caps as pucks. The child must first read the sight word out loud and then may have the chance to shoot it into the net. They are required to at least try to read/ sound out the word before "shooting".

Sight Word Cups:

This can easily be played with plastic kids cups or Dixie cups. Write the sight words on the cups (or tape them to reusable cups) and hide a candy, toy, or some sort of prize underneath some of the cups. Kids then need to read the sight word before lifting up the cup to see if a prize is hidden underneath.



**Two things to note:

1) We are still collecting items for our Hampers for Harmony House. Our theme is Paper and Linens.

2) We are in need of items for our Sensory Bin:

     - cotton balls (large)

     - marshmallows

     - white rice

     - dried beans (any colour)

If you can donate any of these items we would be very appreciative.

Happy December!

Hi Parents!

Happy December! I hope you are finding time to enjoy the first snowflakes and snowballs with your kiddos amidst the hockey practices, holiday shopping and seasonal get togethers! If your home life is anything like our school life right now, I imagine you are very busy! Thank you so much for taking the time to read this little blog post today to learn about the exciting things going on in our classroom.

As some of you have heard, we have a very sneaky little visitor in our classroom this month. “Louis le lutin” has graced us with his presence for the month of December (he’s on special leave from the North Pole with instructions to watch out for well-behaved students and to learn about Grade 1 and our firsties) and will be returning home in a couple weeks.

So far, he has played a few sneaky little tricks on us and has left us coded messages and sweet, personalized notes for the students. We are having a great time writing to Louis and practicing letter writing, proper letter format, capitalization of names and letter at the beginning of sentences, appropriate punctuation for our sentences, and much more! Every day when we arrive, Louis is up to something new and can be found hanging from the flag pole, playing games on the computer or drinking Madame’s tea. His silliness prompts excellent discussions and wonderfully creative writing ideas.

During math centers, Louis has brought us some fun number sense and numeration games and he is trying to teach us new tricks to make simple addition easier. Our favourite so far is with a number line

(like these ones that we all have at our desks). It would be great to practice this trick at home. The trick goes like this- if your number sentence is 4 +5 = ?, you start at 4 on the number line, then count up 5. Simple as that! J

We are also starting to work on subtraction and since Louis is always stealing and hiding things, we often have to figure out how many are left… This is a problem we are working on today:

Yesterday, homework bags went home for the first time and the students were VERY excited! Please remember to do ONE sheet with your child per book and ask them to color ONE monster on their bookmark each time. I will send home books as frequently as they are returned. Please DO NOT feel that you have to return the homework nightly. You can judge whether your child is feeling overwhelmed with the amount of work or whether they need more of a challenge. Also- I welcome feedback about the home work bags! Thanks!

Lastly, as you also might have heard, this afternoon we are having a little class party!! Each group of students earned 10 behavior points so we are celebrating together with games, music, balloons and our good friend Louis might even do “Le gigue des lutins” (the Elf Jig)!

P.S – Thank you to Isaac’s mom, Tania who has brought in some play doh for us! We are still looking for more play doh, and if anyone is able to make us some we would be very grateful. J