Five for Friday August 12, 2016

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August 12, 2016    WOW, where did the summer break go?

Thank you Doodle Bugs Teaching for the link up.

 
Our school system arranges two days prior to the start of school to assess our incoming kindergarten children.  
Part One is Dibels: First Sound Fluency and Letter Naming Fluency.  
Part Two is a Readiness Assessment consisting of:

• naming pictures
• concepts of print
• short story comprehension
• color identification
• pointing to a capital and lowercase letter
• rhyming
• beginning and ending sounds
• writing name and a cvc word
• math skills of counting, patterning, number recognition, shape recognition and simple verbal addition and subtraction process
  

We have completed the kindergarten assessments and the student rankings will be ready Friday.  Then we will make  our class lists from sorting the students in ability groups: high, average and low.  We just found out that we will only have two kindergarten classes.  
Sadly our third teacher friend had to pack up and move to another building.  We start school next Wednesday.  We will miss you Danielle! 
 

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 When our students are in classes, then I can type up name cards for mailboxes, folder labels and other activities.  What a rush.  I'm already tired and overwhelmed with all that needs to be done. 
So many people say back, "oh you've done this for so many years, it probably is getting easier!"   Well, we teachers know it does NOT.  Yes, we know what we want to do but it all takes time.  And there are always new themes, new procedures, new colleagues and new administrators.  We teachers tend to be perfectionists.  We want things just so.  
I find that I forget how much work it is these first days, weeks of new kindergarten classes.  
NO MORE daily NAPS for me!

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Monday evening, 5:30-7:00 p.m., we have our Kindergarten Parent Orientation meeting.  The parents will find out whose class their child is in.  The bus drivers will talk about bus safety.  And we teachers discuss what Kindergarten is all about now.  I always mention that if the parents remember what they did in First Grade....that is what we are doing in kindergarten now!
It is fun to be reintroduced to some parents that had been students in my class!  (At least no one is a grandparent yet from my first classes.)
 

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I love finding inspirational quotes.  Here is another favorite.

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Does anyone have a good story to laugh at?
....a funny movie?
Laughter is the best medicine.......

Hey, I'm on the verge to cry to release this tension. 

But I still love it!    

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