Kindergarten Newsletter, February 16

Upcoming Events/mark your calendars:

  • Friday, February 16: Son plus one, Let’s Glow Dance tonight in the PC
  • Monday, February 19: No School, Presidents’ Day
  • Tuesday, February 20: 8am Mass
  • Thursday, February 22: Dining for Dollars at the McDonald’s in Countryside; money earned will go towards the spring musical!

Looking Ahead:

KINDERGARTEN MOMS, please save the date for the “Mother’s Day Tea,” a kindergarten tradition!  Moms will be asked to attend this event on Friday, May 10th from 10-11:30.  You won’t want to miss it!  Official permission slips and an invitation will come home in APRIL. Mark your calendars NOW!

What’s Due:

This Week:

Valentine’s Day and Lent on Wednesday, mystery reader on Friday and finally more sunshine and opportunity to play outside.  It was a busy week!

Next Week

Math: Next week, we will finish Chapter 6 in Go Math which is all about SUBTRACTION. We will continue to practice addition and subtraction through the remainder of the school year. We will skip to chapter 8 which is all about numbers BEYOND 20.

  • Counting by 1s to 100.  Practice at home!
  • Counting by 2s to 20. Practice at home!
  • Counting by 5s to 100. Practice at home!
  • Counting by 10s to 100. Practice at home!
  • Addition AND subtraction using dice, dominoes, whiteboards, manipulatives, magnetic numbers and more!  Our goal is to FLUENTLY (automatically) add and subtract within 5 and be able to use drawings, fingers, etc. to add within 10.
  • Recognizing numbers 1-100.
  • Breaking numbers 1-100 down into “tens” and “ones”.

Language Arts:

Superkids: We will  begin booklet “Pp and Vv”; we will reread the short stories in booklet “Mm and Nn” in reading group.  Those booklets will come home next week.  Please continue to watch for book buddy pouches to come home and return by the date indicated.

Word wall words: Next week, we will add dear, must, for

Journaling: Students are now being encouraged to write 2 sentences.  I look forward to sharing their writing with you at conferences in March.  It’s always interesting to see what they view as the important things to write about. 🙂  We talk about how even the smallest things are worth writing about! Current journaling expectations: Write the date, write 1-2 sentences, finger spaces in between words, end sentence(s) with punctuation, generate own topic, detailed picture.

Religion: We will continue with our senses unit! It was such a busy week, we didn’t get to our smell test, so we will get to that next week.  We will then get to our final sense which is TASTE. Thank you God for our senses!

We will begin the STATIONS OF THE CROSS. We will go to church as a class.  1st-8th goes as a school, but we always go separately to try and be a bit more age appropriate and also give the kids a chance to ask questions.  They usually have them! 🙂 We talk about how Jesus’ journey to the cross is definitely a sad story, BUT, Jesus does not want us to be sad! He gives us Easter as a reminder that he doesn’t want us to be sad, he wants us to rejoice and be happy, Jesus has risen!

Lent is a time of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. In kindergarten, we will focus on prayer and almsgiving. We will add the “Our Father” to our daily morning prayer time. We will also pray the stations of the cross each week in church.  For almsgiving, we will be collecting change for our “rice bowls” which is a Catholic tradition https://support.crs.org/donate/change-life-lent-0 ms=orbgoo0924rbl00gen01&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAibeuBhAAEiwAiXBoJKNrDBcAMQsJ2ZxdN6q91RMAaljVyQluGM4lDrKiJFdrmThr_J3HSRoCRGYQAvD_BwE 

I told the kids if they have any spare change and would like to donate…that’s doing God’s work!  I of course said to make sure they ask before taking any money from home :).

We will also do our weekly food pantry collection. I’ll have the kids brainstorm ideas, thinking of foods that kindergarten age children would like.  For next week, we are going with peanut butter and/or jelly.  You can send in donations any day next week!  We will drop them off in the food pantry bins at church on FRIDAY when we go for the Stations of the Cross. Lent will be a busy time for us in kindergarten!  We will be working hard to grow more beautiful on the INSIDE!

Here is the Lent letter that was sent home earlier in the week: Lent Letter 3

Language