Kindergarten Newsletter, January 24

Upcoming Events/Mark your calendars:

Next Week is Catholic School’s Week. The events are listed below, or click here: Catholic Schools Week flyer for 2025

Mrs. Zontos and I hope to see you at the open house on SUNDAY! Mass is from 10:30-11:30 and then we’ll be at the school waiting for all of you until 2:30. 🙂  Please bring a friend or neighbor and show off our school!

  • Monday, January 27: Favorite plaid shirt uniform! Wear your favorite plaid. Have a Math competition in Class – challenge each other!
  • Tuesday, January 28: Our School is SOUPER!! Regular Dress today – we have 8am Mass.  We will say a special blessing for Teachers at the Mass.     Bring a soup can to donate to the food pantry.  Write a letter as to why we strongly agree that “God Is Present in My Life.”
  • Wednesday, January 29: Teacher Appreciation Day: Teachers can dress down and will enjoy lunch from the FSA!  Students can wear spirit wear! A BIG thanks to Emilio and Mikey’s moms for being the volunteer lunch supervisors this day so Mrs. Zontos and I can enjoy the special lunch together!
  • Thursday, January 30: Student Appreciation Day: Books, Board Games & Buddies! Teachers will find a time during the day to share some special time with their buddies. Freeze pops for students!
  • Friday, January 31: Red & White Day!  Red and White Game: We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit how ‘bout YOU!?  Students in grades 1-8, wear your assigned red or white color along with gym shoes for the red and white volleyball games, which take place throughout the school day. Spirit wear for everyone else! Kindergarten will watch their 8th grade buddies play at 2:00.  We do not play in the game in kindergarten, we just do a whole lot of cheering! 🙂

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:

  • RSVP for the spring auction!
  • If you would like to be a mystery reader and didn’t have a chance to sign-up (the sign-up is full), please just reach out and give me a day that works for you at 2:30! We’d love to have you.  Remember, one mystery reader slot per child! Wish we had time for more! 🙂

This Week:

  • Please watch for an email from the room moms about our upcoming valentine’s party soon!
  • Next week kicks off the start of a busy few weeks in kindergarten!  First up, Catholic School’s Week, followed by the 100th day celebration and then our Valentine’s Day party. Be sure to watch for important email reminders about all these special events!
  • We finished the iReady reading and math diagnostic tests.  YAY!  As a reminder, the iready diagnostic exam is an adaptive, computerized assessment that the kids take every year in the fall, winter and spring to track academic growth in reading and math.  This begins in kindergarten and continues to 8th grade.  When they’re not taking the diagnostic they are on their personalized “learning path.” All students completed both assessments as of Friday!  This is just ONE assessment.  It does not show the the FULL learning growth of each child.  A computer assessment can also be a bit more challenging for the younger ones, so keep that in mind as well.  That being said, I am very proud of all the growth shown by the diagnostic assessments but am even more excited to share with you the many other ways we measure your child’s growth. I’ll share that with you at conferences in March!

Next Week:

Language Arts:

  • We will continue to practice LAST names.
  • We will continue unit 2 in Fundations with G, H, I, J capital letter formation.  We will continue blending two and three sounds together.
  • We have started our SUPERKIDS decodable readers and fluency passages. The kids like meeting the different characters and then seeing them in readers.  Watch for for these readers along with fluency passages to come home for practice!
  • 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, BY, WENT and number words ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT and NINE.  Next week, I will introduce AM, PLAY, WITH.
  • Journaling: We will continue to journal.  Students are expected to write 1 topic sentence followed by at least one additional detail sentence.

Read alouds: The kids did SO well naming the different story elements in The Snowy Day and Snow Day.  Next week, We will read 3 Jan Brett stories including The Mitten, The Hat and The Snowy Nap.  We will complete sequencing and story element activities to check for comprehension!

Math: We will continue modules 11-13 which is all about addition and subtraction.  That will be our main focus for the next 2 months.

  • 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 to 100 by 5s.  At home: please practice!
  • Counting to 20 by 2s. At home: Start to practice!
  • Acting out and solving  addition problems within 10.
  • Acting out and solving subtraction problems within 10.

We will also continue to practice:

  • tallying, graphing and sorting!

Religion:  We will continue our new kindness project in kindergarten.  “God’s love keeps us warm” is the theme for the next two months. We we will watch for students who work hard to show God’s love to their friends and will ask them to put a heart sticker on their mittens which are hanging on our door.  This also goes along well with our books about Martin Luther King which will again reinforce how we treat one another and the importance of using our words. We will also continue our senses unit next week.  We will learn about the 5 senses and how our senses help us to learn more about God’s world. Next week, we will continue to learn about our sense of sight of “hearing.” Students will complete a hearing “test” to see if they can draw what they HEAR (not using any other senses but hearing) and students will go on a “sound walk” to see what they hear around the building.

We will celebrate our wonderful catholic school next week!  We will learn a new song called, “We go to a catholic school…” and will illustrate that song in our poetry and song journals. Be sure to refer to the Catholic School’s Week schedule above!

Language