Friday April 4

Hello April and hello to the new US Steel eaglet, born March 27th! We've been watching mom and dad feed the chick breakfast and lunch every day. Ask your child what the baby eats and how he or she keeps warm.

Dress Like a Digraph week was a lot fun! Thanks for your assistance (and creativity); It made each day more enjoyable than the last! (Not pictured: all your amazing takes on THREE and our wide array of choice outfits.)

This week in math, we worked on partners of 10. One of our objectives by the end of kindergarten is for kids to be able to fluently identify all the ways to make 10 with two numbers. We are well on our way between these two new games, both of which you can play at home with a normal deck of cards!

The first card game is called Make 10 and it's played like Go Fish. Take the jokers, kings, queens, and jacks out of the deck. Aces are 1. Players keep 5 cards in their hand at a time and match up partners of 10 (1/Ace and 9, 2 and 8, 3 and 7, 4 and 6, 5 and 5. 10s can be put down without a match.) If you need a card, ask another player or Go Fish!

The second game is called Pyramid. Remove the face cards like in the game above. Set up the remaining cards in a 7 row, overlapping pyramid like pictured below, and put the rest of the cards in a discard pile. You can match up any cards that make 10 and are uncovered or "unlocked" and not under another card in any way. Once you can't make any more matches, you can take a card from the discard pile. Keep playing until all the cards are partnered up and the pyramid is gone!

Meanwhile in ELA, the kids are growing by leaps and bounds. They are seeing digraphs everywhere and it's showing up in their writing. This is the time of year when everything begins to click. Ask your child, in the word on the boards below, how many letters? How many sounds? Why aren't they the same number?

We independently read and recorded more books this week, too!

We ended diagraph week with What's in the Bag Show and Tell. Knowing those sounds really helped us make great guesses!