Hillcrest Primary School
In Trisha Springborn’s class, we started January by reviewing the rules, then jumped right back into working on letters of the alphabet. We had fun making a jack in the box for the letter j, cutting and reviewing shapes. We made an alligator for the letter a and had to cut out the sharp teeth in a zig-zag pattern. We have also picked out the first letter in our names and have been filling in sounds we know when writing our daily message. The boys and girls enjoy the surprise when giving clues to their peers on what is hiding in their letter of the week bag. We continue to work on line basics and following and listening to directions. Manners are reinforced daily. The theme of the year in our classroom is showing kindness to our peers and teachers.
Melissa Mahloch’s class has been practicing shared reading (reading with a partner) and discussing our thoughts on the pictures we see in books. We have been reading wordless picture books. We have been playing a lot of math games to practice counting, recognizing numbers and writing our numbers.
Sally Slezewski’s class has participated in making Mossy and Hedgie, two characters that they have learned about from our author study on Jan Brett. In our studies we have learned that she writes and illustrates her books. We have discovered that she uses borders in all of her books and draws detailed animals. We will continue with other author studies for the next few months.
In Michelle Oss’ LEADS Charter 4K class, the children had the opportunity to work with a literacy coach from Illinois, Jennifer Burton. Mrs. Burton taught us about text features in books such as bold words, labels, photographs and captions. Now the children are working on making their own text features book to help them remember to look for those text features when they are reading for information.