When January approaches, each Kindergartner is given their very own book bag that follows them to school and home each day. With the amount of tools and things that are in the book bags, here is a quick peek and let you know all of the wonderful things that is in it! When the Kindergartners bring home their book bag each night, it is a chance for them to read to families, practice reading strategies, and continue to master their sight words!

Each Kindergartner gets a different book or two each week in their book bag, This is the book that we are reading at school, in our reading groups. Some of the words, phrases, or books may be slightly challenging for the Kindergartners, but that is good! If they are coming across a word that they are struggling with, the best thing to do is remind them to use their reading strategies. If they continue to struggle, sometime you need to help them with a word or so. It may be a sight word that we haven't learned yet or a name that does not make sense. They'll have one book from school in their book bags each week but please feel free to read books from home as well! 

Our reading strategies!

Since I mentioned using our reading strategies, it's important that I also introduce them. In each book bag, there is a bookmark with all of the different reading strategies that we use in Kindergarten. Try asking your Kindergartner about which ones they know and how they help them. It can be helpful to have the bookmark out when they are reading since it is a quick reference and reminder for them. We have not learned all of them yet, but will as the year goes on!

Our Sight Words!

Inside our book bag there is our sight word fluency book. This is organized into 12 lists, with 10 sight words on each list. These are the sight words that we are going to be learning over the course of the year. You'll be amazed at how much practicing sight words can strengthen reading skills. Please pracitce the current list (or 2 if they would like) that you Kinder is currently on. Once they have mastered a list, I assess them on it and then they get to put a sticker over the list number on the cover and "level up". It is a fun way to motivate them to practice their sight words and fluency. Please do not feel that you have to practice all lists (they are designed to be practiced one at a time) and feel free to pracitce sight words in other ways. Building them with play-doh, rainbow writing them, making sentences with them, or even finding them in books. 

Our Word Work Notebooks!

These are our word work notebooks. In them is the work that we do in reading groups. We work on everything from rhyming, to word families, to learning new blends. If they want to work on different things in their notebook, that is great! Feel free to use it for sight word practice, writing sentences, or anything else they would like to practice.