If your family celebrates Christmas ...

Wishing you and your family a very Merry Christmas!

The Aroma of Gingerbread...

Have you heard the news?  We started making gingerbread cookies in celebration of our reading of the Gingerbread Man fairy tale.  We mixed the dough yesterday, and put it in the fridge.  Today we'll roll out the dough and bake the cookies. (Hopefully, none of our gingerbread boys and girls will jump out of the oven and run away!)  We'll decorate the cookies tomorrow, and taste them.  If we have enough cookies, the children will bring a couple of cookies home, too.

Stay tuned for more news soon!  

If Your Family Celebrates Hanukkah,

Best wishes for a Happy Hanukkah!  

We hope your holidays have started well,

 and you are enjoying the celebrations 

with family and friends.

Junior Kindergarten Visits & Senior Kindergarten Meetings

As you are aware, we have been meeting with parents for the past few weeks to discuss their child's progress in our Kindergarten class.  We have enjoyed meeting with parents and discussing their child's growth over the last few months of school.

Some parents have asked for information about ideas that they can do at home to help their child learn more about letters and/or words.  Here are some ideas that we think your child may enjoy:
1.  Play letter/word games together. Here are some examples of games you can easily adapt for either letters or words:

• Play "I Spy..." at home or when you are out.  It's a good way to occupy young children when you have a few minutes to wait.   E.g.,"I spy the letter 's' on the menu.  Or "I spy the word 'the' on a sign."  Of course, you can always play 'I Spy..." for numbers, shapes or colours, too;
• Play "Memory or Concentration":  make a set of word/letter cards.  Each word/letter will need two cards.  We like to print two versions for each word/letter.  For e.g., The ... the,   And ... and,   M ... m,  S ... s, etc.   A set of 12 cards is a good start.  Mix the cards, and lay them face down. First player takes his/her turn by turning over two cards.  If the cards match, he/she reads the cards and takes the matching cards.  If the cards don't match, he/she turns the cards over again, and the next player has a turn.  The player with the most matches at the end of the game is the winner;
• Play "Letter/Word Detective":  Your child will need a piece of paper, a pencil and some pages from a newspaper/magazine.  Ask your child to locate and record letters/words from the newspaper/magazine.  Print the letter/word at the top of his/her recording page.  If your child needs help to correctly form the letters, show them once or twice how to correctly print the letter/word and have him/her practise. Praise his/her efforts.  If he/she needs more help, you may want to print the letter/word with a yellow marker a few times on the recording page.  Then he/she can trace the letter/word each time he/she finds one;
• Play commercial games and puzzles together. There are various word/letter games and puzzles available for purchase.  For e.g., letter/word Bingo or Junior Scrabble; and
• Websites/Apps:  Your child may enjoy playing word/letter games on websites/apps.  You can link to the 'Starfall' site from our Blog.  If you have other favourite websites/apps, let us know in the comments section, and we'll pass on the information.

2.  Continue reading to and with your child.  As you read, point under each word.  It may help your child notice what you are attending to when you read.  In class, we sometimes play 'secret signal' when we are trying to notice a word/letter while we are reading. For example, 'touch your nose (our secret signal) when you see or hear the word:  can'.

3.  Encourage your child to write for meaningful purposes.  For e.g., cards, shopping lists, E-mail, messages, signs, etc.  Let them have access to various kinds of paper, pencils, crayons, envelopes, etc.  (Short pencils/crayons encourage a better pencil grip.)   Here is a chart that shows the stages of writing that we often see in Kindergarten writing:

As you can see, standard spelling takes a while to develop.  Rather than spelling words for the children, we prefer to tell them to 'say the words slowly, and write down the letters that they hear'. We find that when a child worries about spelling each word perfectly, he/she often ends up not wanting to write very much, and he/she often has difficulty rereading what he/she recorded.  As we learn words, we do ask many children to spell the 'word wall words' correctly.  Here are the words we have worked on so far in our class:

a     and     can    I    is    like    look    no     see   the   we    yes

In addition, we have worked on 'ing family words' (e.g., king, sing, swing, playing, etc.).  Many children are aware that if they hear the 'ing' sound in a word, they will need to write   i n g.

We hope you find the above ideas informative and useful.  If you have any questions/concerns, please let us know, and we will do our best to help.