September 27, 2010
Dear Parents,
Fall has arrived and October is almost here. Keep looking for leaves and pressing them in old phone books. They need time to dry.
This week Mrs. Withee and I will be gone on Thursday and Friday as we have the opportunity to attend an Early Literacy Teaching Conference. Then we will also be gone the following Monday and Tuesday to another conference on Classroom Behavior Management. Mrs. Claire Leivestad will be subbing for me for time I am gone. This is sometimes a worrisome time for children, to have this kind of change, but I assure you it will return back to normal. Please talk to and encourage your children to be polite and great listeners.
We work with “Dd” this week. Keep practicing the name of each letter, the sound it makes, and how to write it. Even though we emphasize a letter during the week we also are always taking opportunities as they arise to talk about other sounds, too. Don’t expect as many papers home in the coming weeks. I’m saving them for their portfolios to show you at conferences in November. We are also working with rhyming words. This is an important skill to help listen for similarities and differences. In the car is a good place to see if you can think of rhymes!
Our Bible lessons this week take us back to Moses and the Israelites. We’ll learn about their movable tent church, or tabernacle, and the gifts they brought to God. Our Bible verse this week is Psalm 100:2 “Worship the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful songs.” We will make special banks this week that encourage the children to put some in savings, some for spending, and some for offering to God. This is the last week our offering will go to the Main Street Living.
We’ve begun simple guided reading lessons. Some groups are working with letters and the sounds they make and we play many games to learn these. Others are reading little books, learning to take a “book look” first, to see what they can discover before they actually read the book. They learn a few specific sight words, or “fast words” as I call them. This helps them read confidently and saves their “stretching out” strategy for bigger words. Then they reread for fluency practice.
I have put a set of alphabet cards in each child’s backpack. Go through each set of capital and lowercase letters practicing say the name of the letter and then go through saying the sound it makes. Make sure they have the sounds down as that will influence the success at reading. Please always put the cards back in their backpack as we will use them at school some days too. The homework bag should have a sheet of paper with other suggestions to use when working with your child. Some students have books in their homework bag too.
We are finished with our unit on senses and will move on to fire safety, weather, autumn, and plants. We will discuss an emergency plan for getting out of your home in a fire, so you might want to practice crawling out with your eyes closed, and choose a meeting place in the yard, etc. The next two weeks we’ll enjoy making our room look like fall has arrived!
In math we are finishing our exploring of math materials and now ill really begin working on counting and comparing skills. Rote counting is important, but it’s more important for them to have many experiences counting sets of things and comparing them to other sets. It is a very hands-on approach, as they need to see what they are doing and verbalize why they do what they do.
Don’t forget tonight to help pack that backpack for tomorrow! Put in your library books, Monday folder with the lunch order for next week, something beginning with “d”, and the Math Binder.

God’s blessings,
Natalie Graumann