Kindergarten Newsletter, March 22

Upcoming Events/mark your calendars:

  • Saturday, March 23: Easter Egg hunt at 9am
  • Thursday, March, 28: 2pm dismissal
  • Friday, March 29: No School, Good Friday
  • April 1st: begin spring break, return April 8th

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:

  • Granola bars, crackers, goldfish, snack foods: The kids decided on breakfast items for the food pantry donation next week. Feel free to send in boxes of cereal, pancake or waffle mix.  If it’s needed at your house next week, no worries! 🙂
  • Permission slips: please turn in the library field trip permission slips along with $8 by Thursday next week.  We have 4 chaperones so far. I can take 2 more.  Thank you!

This Week:

This week flew by!  We were busy during our religion time talking about “God’s superstars”–St. Patrick and St. Joseph; as soon as those days passed, it was on to talking about Easter and holy week!

Next Week:

Saturday is the school Easter egg hunt. The kids always have a blast.  Hope you can make it!  It’s at 9am.  Their coloring contest pages all looked great too!  What a tough choice.  They all did a great job!

The St. Cletus Book fair is next week! Feel free to shop with your child on Tuesday  and Wednesday after school from 3-4 or on Thursday from 2 (early dismissal day) until 3. We will visit the book fair on Tuesday to browse and come up with some wish list ideas.  I’ll remind the kids that the library is also a great place to look for some of those books too! If you need us to help your child shop, we’d be more than happy to do that! We will take any kids that need to purchase on WEDNESDAY. Please make sure the money is in an envelope clearly marked.  Please specify how much your child is supposed to spend and also if it’s okay to hit up the very popular toy table or if the money is only for books. 🙂  If you can take your child AFTER school, that would be GREAT too!

Math: Chapter 8 is complete and we will just start a bit of Chapter 9 next week which is all about 2d shapes.

  • 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”.
  • Naming square, circle, rhombus, rectangle, oval; going over sides and vertices.

Language Arts: St. Patrick’s Day books were put away and the Easter books came out!  Next week, we will continue to read Easter stories for our read alouds and also at the listening center. Many of them are fiction, but we will also read some books about the very first Easter. We continue to discuss what makes a book fiction or nonfiction. We are working hard on retelling stories, giving details from the beginning, middle and end while also including the characters, setting, problem and solution.

Superkids: We will wrap up our latest superkids booklet K, Q, J next week. Remember to put this booklet in a safe spot and pull it out to practice the decodable stories inside.  When we return from break, we will be on to our last superkids booklet– x, y, z!

Word wall words: I will introduce SAID next week and we will continue to review all other words.

Journaling: We’ve got 2 sentences down, so now students are being encouraged to expand even more on their thoughts by writing 3 or more sentences! Journaling is of my favorite times of the day.  I love seeing what the kids are thinking about.

Religion:.

  • Next week we have a lot to cover during religion time!  We will be making Holy Week flip books: Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday will be the days we will illustrate.  We will also illustrate our new pocket chart song which goes like this: Holy, holy, holy week, Easter’s a week away!  All that happens Holy Week begins on Palm Sunday! We will read about the events of Holy Week from the children’s bible. We will share bread with our friends on Holy Thursday.  Finally, we will visit church and drop off our last load of food for the food pantry.  The kids decided on SNACK foods.  Kendall Grant who is in charge of the food pantry said they’re especially looking for crackers, granola bars, goldfish, etc. On Thursday, we will be taking a tour of the food pantry to see where all of our donations have gone!
Language