Let's Eat Pie..and Bread...and Squash...and a Pot?!

I know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie!

It's my favorite time of year again! It's time to begin learning how to retell stories in kindergarten AND what better way to start than with the silly Old Lady who eats EVERYTHING at Thanksgiving dinner!

If you're familiar with the song I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, then you'll pick up a slightly revised version of her eating her way straight through Thanksgiving. The students read the story today and worked on creating their Little Old Lady and all of the things she eats during dinner.

We colored in our Little Old Ladies....

Then, we cut out all of the things she ate...pie, turkey, bread, cider...

Then, we get together in groups and retell the story to a friend so that we get the practice remembering what elements of the story came first, next, and last. This is an important skill we will continue to work on throughout our time in kindergarten and is very important to their overall reading comprehension and writing skills.

Retelling the Little Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Pie.

Groups got together to retell their versions of the story.

She even ate a pot! Imagine that!

Ask your student to use their Little Old Lady to retell their version of the new classic!

Letters and Sounds

Over the past two months we have been working on learning the names and sounds of letters using the Fundations curriculum. As of this week we've learned 17 letters and their sounds!

You may have noticed that your student has begun to identify letters and their sounds, but that they also use a keyword to help them remember the sound the letter makes. Like....

A - apple - /a/.....B - bat - /b/

I try to remind the students to "cut off" their letter sounds and not add the "uh" at the end of each sound. So, C really just says c  and not cu! They really love this idea when we get to the letter P and they tell me that P says pu and I say "oh, no! That's stinky! P U??? It's just p!" 

We also challenge ourselves each week we learn new letters to come up with as many words that begin with that letter as possible. This week we thought of the most ever - 38 P words! Here are a few of the lists we've been able to create together!

We thought of 26 words that begin with the letter J!

Sometimes letters also make the sound of the letter we learned like the
soft G or our consonant blend, dr, can sometimes be confused for the J sound.

20 R words! And.....

The most EVER!!! 38 words that begin with P!

I hope your student is bringing home their learning and sharing with you all of the sounds that they've learned so far. It may sound like it's taking a long time to learn our letters and sounds, but it sets us up for really great work in the winter with decoding new words, writing CVC words (I'll have another post about this later), and reading our Just Right Reading Books in the coming months.