Our First Heggerty Lesson
Whole Group Times
Today's meeting time began with our kid counter Sanvi counting up the students. Jack told us the date, Ethan gave us the forecast for the day, and Nora told us today is day seven of JK. Then Eyza filled us in on the schedule for the day. For some children it was their first Wednesday of JK! Yesterday we practiced putting our voices on and off to get ready for tomorrow's first Lively Letter lesson. So to sign in today, we asked the children to try and recall if they can feel vibration when their voice is turned on. After signing in, we worked on practicing feeling our throats to notice the difference between voiced and unvoiced sounds.
Today during our math block we continued on with counting and numeral recognition of numbers 1-9. The group that did not have a turn to go on Monday did so today. Each JK student had a turn to come to the front of the class, close their eyes, and pick a number card. They read the number on the card and then could count out that number of gems, or do that number of hops, twirls, or claps. If your child had a turn to go today you can ask them what they chose to do.
Today we had our first Heggerty lesson! Heggerty is the program that we, and many next schools as well as BPS, use to build phonological and phonemic awareness. We use both Lively Letters and Heggerty as our literacy programs because they focus on different parts of the learning process and use different styles. Heggerty trains the ears while Lively Letters connects the mouth, eyes, and ears to the written page. We will talk more about this during our curriculum night on September 29. Today we worked on rhyming, initial sounds, ending sounds, blending words, and segmenting words. We also sang the alphabet together! Please see the attached parent newletter for an overview of weeks 1-4 of our Heggerty lessons.
At the end of the day Georgia, this week's Librarian, chose Stephanie's Ponytail for story.
Classroom Explorations
Today Ms Sheryl was back in our classroom to work one on one with the students to get to know them better. She came in after meeting and stayed until our first outside time. This will normally be her day to work in small groups with the children once her check ins are complete. Today we had stencils, plain paper, scissors, and markers open at the activity table. Using stencils helps the children build the hand muscles, finger control, and hand eye coordination needed for writing. We also had open:
a counting puzzle before meeting and snack after meeting at the round table
play dough at the trapezoid table before and after Sheryl
crafting and creating at the drawing table
Magnatiles and space action figures on the rug
our slime trays
the sensory table with clear water beads, jars, nets, a strainer, and ocean gems
the easel with paint crayons and silly animal stickers
the book loft
our pretend area
the dollhouse
the light table with gems, a rainbow puzzle, unicorn figures, trees, and clear building blocks
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