Looking ahead/Mark your calendars:
- Saturday, April 29: Cardinal Palooza: It’s going to be a great night for our school! Don’t forget to check out the kindergarten baskets. Mrs. Zontos and I can’t wait to see who gets to take them home! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i3dq3RuLGAlJhTvhnmWrHj_11kFKyJXQRO9PyP7EAME/edit?usp=sharing
- Friday, May 12: Kindergarten Mother’s Day Tea at 10am; ALL moms are invited to attend this event, which is a kindergarten tradition!
- Wednesday, June 7: Kindergarten Celebration, 10:30am–plan on attending!
What’s Due?
- Hot lunch: Don’t forget to place your weekly hot lunch orders!
- Mystery Reader: Last chance! If you’d like to be a mystery reader, please reach out to me and we can find a date that works. Thank you!
This Week:
- The kids had so much fun at the field trip! Back at school, we had fun talking about our favorite parts of the trip. The books the librarian read were all about friendship so it was fun for the kids to reflect on the friendships they have formed in our classroom and the many ways they’ve learned to feel God’s love through their friends.
- We celebrated the feast day of St. Cletus this week with an ice cream treat from Mr. Porod and Mrs. Schaefer. The kids enjoyed the special treat outside with friends and beautiful weather!
- The children these past few weeks have been SO busy reading in the classroom. It’s just the absolute BEST time of the year in kindergarten. I tell the kids when I hear their little voices reading books, it’s ‘music to my teacher ears’. What I don’t tell them is I ALSO secretly enjoy the moans and groans I hear when I say it’s time to put the books away and move on to to the next activity. 🙂 The children love independent or buddy reading and are always quick to grab a book off the shelf when we have a few spare minutes transitioning between activities. It’s also a great reminder of how important it is to always have a well stocked collection of physical books (vs digital) available to children both in the classroom and at home.
Next Week:
Our caterpillars have arrived! We will be talking about the life cycle of a caterpillar to butterfly. We will be reading many fiction and nonfiction books about catperillars and butterflies.
We will begin the final iready READING and MATH diagnostic tests. These results will be included in your child’s final report card envelope. Remember–though the final diagnostic can give us valuable growth data, I still do all my own assessments which often times are a bit more accurate than ONE test. The results from one computer exam is not always the MOST accurate way to gauge progress with the little ones and they have ALL made a lot of progress that we should all be proud of!
Language Arts:
- High Frequency words: focus words: review at, get, if, mom, dad; introduce: come, somewe will continue to practice reading and writing days of the week and months of the year. The final word wall was sent home earlier this week!
- Journaling/writing: daily journaling continues with the children working hard to write 2+ sentences; we will be doing more partner sharing of journals beginning next week. Students will have to give one compliment to their partners. “I like the details you have in your drawings.” “I like how neatly you write your letters.” “You have really nice finger spaces in between your words,” etc.
- Interactive writing and word work: We will continue to write sentences that the chosen writing leader generates and then will do “word work time”, focusing on long vowel words and the job of the silent or “magic e”.
- Guided reading, fluency journals: We will work on phonics skills in our small groups while reading books that focus on those different phonics skills. Small group work work includes nonsense words, CVC, CVCe words and words with the Jolly Phonics digraphs we have learned this school year.
- Pocket chart poem: One of our Mother’s Day songs will be in the pocket chart next week. We will illustrate this in our poetry journals.
- Read alouds: fiction and nonfiction spring books–books about plants and books about caterpillars and butterflies. We will also read books about moms and will be making connections to these stories.
Math:
We started Chapter 9 which is all about 2D shapes. We will be focusing on circles, squares, triangles, hexagons, trapezoids, rhombuses and rectangles. Students will be expected to name the number of sides for each shape and the number of vertices (corners). We will be working on drawing the shapes on graph paper, making them on geoboards and creating them with pattern blocks.
Review:
- Addition and subtraction practice
- Identify word problems as “addition” or “subtraction”, generate an equation and solve.
- Counting to 100 by ones, fives and tens
- Counting to 20 by 2s.
- Count forward from a given number (except 1)
- Money: Identifying the penny, nickel, dime and quarter, the value of each and recognize some of the symbols. We will also work on counting groups of coins.
Religion/Science:
- New life in spring reminds us of Jesus’ new life in heaven! We will be searching for signs of spring, while observing a few in our classroom as well–we have both caterpillars and plants (from seed) that we are taking care of. The caterpillars have arrived and we will begin making observations in our journals next week!
- We feel God’s love through our moms! We will be talking a lot about our moms over the next few weeks as we get ready for the Mother’s Day Tea. We are busy preparing the artwork and entertainment right now!