Upcoming Events/Mark your calendars:
- Monday, December 9: Dining for dollars at Chipotle, 5801 S. La Grange Road in Countryside, from 4-8pm; for online ordering, use code: VRR2C23 or show the flyer at the restaurant. Love when Monday dinners are covered! 🙂
- Tuesday, December 10th and Wednesday, December 11th: Kindergarten is signed up to visit the “Holiday Treasures Gift Shop.” Please see the handout that was sent home: Holiday Treasures gift shop is back!-2 This is completely optional. We will do our purchasing Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon during rest time. Also, keep in mind the shop is open December 11th after school from 3-4 for you to take your child. If you do choose to send your child with money or you decide to purchase a voucher, it would be SUPER helpful if you could preview the items so your child has a shopping plan in mind. It is usually a longer shopping experience when you take the little one, so anything you can do help us speed up the decision making process would be GREAT!! 🙂
- Friday, December 20: This will be our Christmas Kindergarten performance day! Please mark your calendars and plan to attend! 🙂 Here is the plan: Mass will be at 9:30, prepared by the kindergarten and 8th grade. Immediately following the 9:30 Mass, students will get on the altar to present their songs and poems. The Mass and presentation will go until about 11:00. After this, students will return to school for lunch and then have a birthday party for Baby Jesus beginning at 12:45. Please watch for an email from the rooms moms about our afternoon party! Don’t forget, this is also an early 2pm dismissal day.
And finally…save the date for the 2025 SPRING AUCTION: VEGAS NIGHT: April 5th, 6pm in the Parish Center. ALWAYS such a fun night! Please consider attending!
What’s Due:
- Christmas Giving Tree donation: Each child is asked to contribute $1-$5 to go toward the purchase of grocery gift cards for the St. Cletus Food Pantry Giving Tree Program. Students are asked to bring this to school by Thursday, December 12th. This information was also in your Wednesday envelope.
This Week: We hit the ground running with all things CHRISTMAS this week! We completed two art projects this week and will begin to work on two more next week. On Thursday the 12th, I’ll be taking pictures of the kids for a special ornament project. They’ll look cute in whatever they wear, but just a heads up in case you have a favorite Christmas sweater or shirt you’d like them to wear for their Christmas keepsake. 🙂 I’ll send a reminder email the day before!
We ended the week with a visit from St. Nicholas on Friday. He brought each of us a candy cane. Happy St. Nick’s Day!
Next Week:
Language Arts: In Fundations I have introduced:
- T, top, /t/,
- B , bat, /b/
- F, fun, /f/
- M, man, /m/
- N, nut, /n/
- i, itch, /i/
- u, up, /u/
- c, cat, /c/
- o, octopus, /o/
- a, apple /a/
- g, game /g/
- s, snake /s/
- d, dog /d/
- E, Ed, /e/
- R, rat, /r/
- p, pan, /p/
- j, jug, /j/
- l, light /l/
- k, kite /k/
- h, hat, /h/
- w, wind, /w/
- v, van, /v/
- y, yellow, /y/
- x, fox, /x/
We will be moving on to our last two A-Z sounds: qu, queen, /kw/ (the kids will learn you’ll never use a q without also having a u right after) and z, zebra, /z/. It is SO exciting to be on our last couple sounds of the 26 letter/sounds! Next up, we’ll be moving on to capital letter formation before beginning digraphs (ch, sh, th, wh, ck).
High Frequency words: I have introduced: NO, GO, THE, YES, WE, TO, WILL, DO, A, MY, LIKE, AND, HAVE, HAS, HIS, YOU, AT, IT, IF, IN and color words, RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, PURPLE, WHITE, PINK, BLACK, BROWN. Next week, we will continue two work on our COLOR WORDS, BY and WENT
Writing: We started interactive writing! Each day a student will be chosen at random to share a sentence. This sentence will be written on the smartboard while the students write the sentence on their individual whiteboards. This gives us a chance to have daily practice with: starting a sentence with a capital letter, using finger spaces, stretching words, writing with lowercase letters and ending with punctuation. After sentence writing, we will have some word work practice which right now will focus on CVC words and word wall words.
Read alouds: We are reading Christmas stories during read aloud time and also listening to them at the listening center!
Journaling: This is SUCH an exciting time for reading and writing in our classroom! Students are now starting to generate their own topics and are really working hard to “stretch out” their words. Remember, at this point in their writing development, we want students to “write the sounds they hear.” So, if their sentence is, “I went to my grandma’s house,” they would most likely write it as, “I wet to my gramus hos.” That is GREAT! We will not answer, “how do you spell ____?” We will instead say, “let’s stretch that word and write the sounds you hear!”
Reading group: Students will begin to practice decodable texts using the Superkids program readers and also printable decodable fluency passages. Watch for these to come home in book pouches/bags soon!
Math: We will continue modules 7-9 which is all about:
- Counting to 100 by ones. At home: please practice!
- Counting to 100 by tens (10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100). At home: please practice!
- Counting forward from a given number.
- Identifying a greater number of objects (within 10).
- Identifying a lesser number of objects (within 10).
- Comparing groups within ten.
We will also continue to practice:
- tallying, graphing and sorting!
And I will introduce:
- Skip counting by 5s to 100.
Religion: We are SO busy using these weeks called, “Advent” to get ready for Christmas! We gather around our classroom crib daily and share kind deeds from home. Please continue to guide your child with this Advent project by encouraging your child to look for ways to share kindness at home (silverware on the table, water the Christmas tree, dust, vacuum, wipe the counters, get the mail, hold the door, help a sibling, get a glass of water for mom/dad, etc.). We will continue to “light” a new candle on our Advent wreaths on Mondays. We will continue to practice our songs for the performance on the 20th!