Our bag of tricks!!

The kiddos have been learning and using soooo many tricks to learn how to read. They include...
-understanding our sight words and using the gestures
-looking at the picture when we don't understand a word
-looking at the first letter/sound of the word we don't know
-using sentence segmentation (counting the number of words in a sentence) to help us read a sentence.
For example, if the sentence says, "I like to jump" and by using the picture and first letter sounds, I think the sentence says, 'I like to jump high', I can use the number of words in the sentence to (4), to determine that, "I like to jump high" with  5 words could not be it.

Ask your child about these strategies. I told them how impressed you would be with them saying, 'sentence segmentation' (which happens to be our strategy of the week), so make sure to make a HUGE deal when they say/explain it.

Remember, it is important that when reading to your child at home, parents model both fluent reading (reading smoothly and with expression) and reading by modeling the above strategies. 

In addition to our 'how to read' strategies, we have also  been focusing on our comprehension strategies that include:
-making predictions about what the story will be about BEFORE we read (I wonder who the characters, setting, will be...)
-making connections while we read (That reminds me of...)
-identifying the character
-identifying the setting
-identifying the main idea

In math, we are working on counting with 5-groups (or fast 5s) and counting with 10-groups (or fast 10s). For example, instead of counting to 12 by 1's, we would say 10 (and put up 10 fingers), 11, 12.
                                                                     
                                                                      OOOOO  (The 2 rows are a fast 10)
                                                                      OOOOO
                                                                      OO

Or if we wanted to count to 9, we would start with 5 (and put up 5 fingers), 6, 7, 8, 9.

                                                                      OOOOO (fast 5)
                                                                      OOOO

We also have been working on understanding, identifying, and writing numbers in the teens. We have talked about how each number in the teens has a 1 before it, including those sneaky 11 and 12 numbers (even though they don't have the word 'teen' in it).