Upcoming Events/Mark your Calendars:
- Friday, February 10: Family bingo–see the note sent home in the Wednesday envelope
- Tuesday, February 14: Valentine’s Party! Be sure to send your child to school with valentines to pass out.
- Friday, February 17th: No School, staff inservice
Looking ahead/Mark your calendars/Volunteer opportunities through the end of the school year:
- Cardinal Palooza: Saturday, April 29: hope to see you there!
- Friday, May 12: Kindergarten Mother’s Day Tea: ALL moms are invited to attend this event, which is a kindergarten tradition. Each child needs to have a special someone there. It will be around 10am and will last about one hour–songs, lemonade, muffins and lots of hugs and kisses! Official invite to be sent home in April, but mark your calendars now!
- Wednesday, June 7: Kindergarten Celebration, time TBD–plan on attending!
- Field Trip: We will also have another field trip in the spring, date TBD. This will be another parent volunteer opportunity.
What’s Due:
- Volunteering: If you wish to volunteer at St. Cletus School, please make sure you complete the following requirements. We will have two classroom volunteer opportunities in October. Get these requirements completed! https://stcletusschool.com/volunteering/
- Hot lunch: Don’t forget to place your weekly hot lunch orders!
- Cardinal Palooza: Have you created your page? I have! please go to palooza2023.givesmart.com, click on “Become a #cardinalpalooza VIP” and create a page. If we just get all our school families to REGISTER, we get a prize! Other incentives include: first class that hits $2500—an ice cream truck will come to school for our class! If you surpass your family goal (you set your own goal)–you get your desk/table spot decorated! If you raise more than $100–you get to spin a wheel of prizes! If our class raises the most money–we get a pizza party! If your family raises the most money–you get a round trip limo ride, to and from school! If our class raises the most money–your child’s teacher gets a spa day! 🙂 If you hit your family goal by March 1, you get get entered to win raffle prizes! So much fun! Please help support this very important fundraiser for our school in any way you can!
- Mystery Reader: Please consider signing up! https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0548A9A62AAAFB6-mystery
This Week:
Another busy week in kindergarten! We finished up valentine’s projects which will go home on Monday. We learned about our sense of smell and did a smelling test. The kids LOVE testing their senses…lots of laughs and cheers when predictions are correct!
Next Week:
We will be celebrating Valentine’s Day on Tuesday! We will pass out valentines in the morning and have our party in the afternoon. Don
‘t forget to send your child with valentines! EVERY student should have something to pass out to classmates. Click here for the note that was sent home about Valentine’s Day: valentine pass out letter
Language Arts:
- High Frequency words: February/March word wall went home on Friday. These are words that we will practice reading and writing by the END of March. Next week: HE, SHE, WHAT
- Journaling: Daily journaling continues! Many students are beginning to write more than 1 sentence. I am so proud of how well they are doing with “writing the sounds they hear.” At home: help your child see you writing by making a grocery list, writing cards or making a card for someone.
- Interactive writing: a writing leader is chosen and creates a sentence that the rest of the students write on their whiteboards. Soon, the audience will ask the leader questions which will help that student generate a second sentence and eventually a third sentence! This daily activity helps with journal writing and expanding thoughts beyond the topic sentence.
- Guided reading, fluency journals: in small groups we will practice reading books and passages that help students practice specific phonics skills. We will practice by segmenting and blending ‘nonsense words’ (geb, dom, ruz) and real words too. In small groups, we will practice buddy reading (with a partner), independently or with a whisper phones.
- Pocket chart poem: Show God’s love to everyone, everyone, everyone, show God’s love to everyone and they’ll show love to you! We will illustrate this pocket chart song in our poetry journals.
- Read Alouds: We’re all about LOVE next week! We will be reading Valentine’s stories and will be listening to them at the listening center too. We are really working hard on our comprehension of stories which is what you’ve seen come home the past few weeks–retelling, sequencing, answering details, making connections, naming characters and the setting–these are all ways that show comprehension of the stories we are reading. I’ve been excited to see the data from iready that shows their comprehension skills are really improving. I also see many more hands going up in there air during read alouds when I ask questions. At home: try asking about characters and the setting. Ask your child to make predictions, “what do you think is going to happen next? And then you too, make your own prediction! Ask your child to make a connection. “Does this remind you of anything that happened to you?” “Does this remind you of another book we’ve read?” Then you too, make a connection! The kids always LOVE making connections at school. It’s their turn to talk about…themselves! 🙂 Ask your child, “what was the problem in the story?” “How was the problem solved?” “Which was your favorite illustration?” “Did you like this story? Why or why not?” Don’t ask all these questions with one book :), but these are all great ways to support your reader at home.
Math:
Chapter 5: We have two more days of Chapter 5 to complete and then we will start Chapter 6 which is all about subtraction. We’ve already started to do subtraction during our calendar time. We have learned that the minus sign tells us we are taking away, or subtraction, the plus sign tells us that we are adding on, or doing addition. Try to find ways to incorporate addition and subtraction into your day— “there are 3 plates on the table, how many more do you need to make 5?” “There are 4 pieces of chicken on the plate, if I take one, how many are left? Did you add or subtract to figure that out?” “You can read three books tonight. We just read one, so how many do you have left to read?”
- Our goal is to FLUENTLY add (and eventually subtract) within 5, and add (and eventually subtract) up to 10 (using objects, drawings, fingers, etc.) We use dice, dominoes, manipulatives, ipad games and more to practice math facts!
- Counting to 100 by ones
- Counting to 100 by 5s and 10s
- Counting to 20 by 2s. They’re doing great with this! At home: Practice counting by 2s!
- Count forward from a given number (except 1)
- Writing & Representing to 20
- 1 to1 Counting of objects to 30
- Represent Addition up to 10 with fingers, drawings, sounds
- Compose and decompose numbers 11-19 by drawing
- Compare two objects (taller/shorter, bigger/smaller, faster/slower)
- We’ve started our unit on MONEY; our learning goals include identifying the penny, nickel, dime and quarter, the value of each and naming some of the symbols on each coin. At home: Dump out your piggy banks….sort the coins by penny, nickel, dime and quarter. Start adding coins together and help your child see how he/she can use skip counting to count coins!
Religion/Science/Social Studies:
- Senses: I’ve got senses, I’ve got senses, yes I do! yes I do! We will begin to explore our senses next week. We learn more about God’s world through our senses! This past week we focused on SMELLING next week we will focus on TOUCHING.