Kindergarten Newsletter, November 1

Upcoming Events/Mark your calendars:

  • Tuesday, November 5: 8am Mass
  • Wednesday, November 6: Picture retake day
  • Friday, November 8: No school; teacher PD day
  • Friday, November 8: Vendor Fair from 6-9

What’s Due?

  • New boom cards are posted! Check them out in your messages!
  • Veteran’s Day Mass is November 11 at 9:30.  Please fill out the form that was sent home if there’s a veteran you’d like to honor. This information was in your Wednesday envelope.
  • FSA is hosting a MRS. FIELDS fundraiser.  The goal is for each family to sell 10 items.  Yum! This information was in your Wednesday envelope.
  • If you choose to do the Pizza Hut reading log, you can turn those in!  For those who have participated before, they don’t mail me the certificates to distribute anymore, they’re printable ones.  They’re not as official looking, but the good news is they’ll still get you that free pizza! 🙂
  • The Halloween candy sort page can be turned in any day next week!  Choose three candies (reeses, skittles, starburst), sort, then count and tally and finally, write the number in the box. Halloween sort 

This Week:

  • We had our final safety drill (lockdown) with the police department present.  The kids did great!
  • The kids had a great time on Halloween.  Special thanks to Emilio and Mikey’s moms for helping to coordinate the party.  We started the morning with our 8th grade buddies.  They drew a haunted house picture for each of us and the kids got to spend some time coloring together.  We then read some books together, sang some songs and taught the 8th graders a circle time game. After this, the kids enjoyed their party time for about an hour.  They played bingo, pin the nose on the pumpkin, bozo buckets, decorated a cupcake and decorated their trunk or treat bags.  After the party, they had lunch, recess and then it was time for trunk or treating!  We had just enough time to squeeze in some free choice time at the end of the day. The kids had a blast!
  • We attended the All Saints’ Day, holy day of obligation Mass, on Friday.  Saints are God’s SUPERSTARS!

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/.

Next week I will introduce p, pan, /p/ and j, jug, /j/.  We are beginning to practice two sound blending daily: /a/ /t/–> AT!  /u/ /g/–> UG!

At home:

High Frequency words:  I have introduced: NO, GO, THE, YES, WE, TO, WILL, DO, A, MY, LIKE, AND, HAVE YOU.  Next week, I will introduce not introduce any new words. We will spend time reviewing all the words listed above. I will send the new NOVEMBER WORD WALL home next week!

Shared writing: We will continue shared writing.  Students follow along as we fill in in missing words or letters on chart paper to create a story about each child following this format: My name is___,  I am __ years old, I like ___, I do not like ____.

Read alouds: Thanksgiving books have appeared on our bookshelf and at our listening center!  We will continue to focus on naming the character, setting, problem and solution and work on the skill of retelling stories from the beginning to the middle and end.

We will learn a new poem called NOVEMBER. We will practice this song in our pocket chart and will illustrate this poem in our poetry journals.

Journaling:  Journaling continues  to focus on:

1.) Drawing pictures with crayons and writing words with pencils.  Pictures go on the top, words on the bottom.

2.) Writing one sentence. We are working on using only lowercase letters (writing in all uppercase is a hard habit to break so we start right away with only using lowercase).

3.) We are working on “finger spaces” in between words.  We use our pointer fingers (or a “space man”/craft stick for lefties) to create that finger space.

Math: We have about a week left to modules 4-6! We will continue working on:

  • Classifying, counting and sorting.
  • Adding and subtracting within 5. We are learning new math words: addition, plus sign, subtraction, minus sign and equal to sign. AT HOME: give your child simple addition and subtraction stories.  For example: “There are 3 plates at the table. If we add 2 more, how many plates do we have altogether?”  “There are 6 cookies on the plate.  If I eat 2 of them, how many are left?”  

We will also continue to practice:

  • Tally marks: We are now representing numbers beyond 20.
  • Counting: we will now be counting by 1s up to 50.
  • Greater than, less than, equal to; using the correct symbol AND reading it correctly too!  “7 is LESS THAN 10.”  “9 is GREATER THAN 2,” etc.
  • Representing numbers 1-20 on a double ten frame.
  • I will introduce counting by TENS next week: 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100.

Religion:  We will wrap up our FEELINGS unit, but will always continue to talk about feelings in our Second Step program. We will begin our month of learning about Thanksgiving as a time to give thanks to God for all our blessings.  We will make turkeys and add thankful feathers to our turkeys.  By Thanksgiving, you will have a colorful turkey decoration to hang!

Science/Social studies:  Next week, it’s all about ELECTION DAY! We will be reading the book DUCK FOR PRESIDENT. We will then have our own election in kindergarten. The two candidates will be duck and farmer brown.

Duck will promise: pajama day and a viewing of the Disney show: Kindergarten the Musical

Farmer Brown will promise: Free play in the gym with a special cookie snack and juice.

Students will enter an election booth, vote and we’ll tally up the results!  I wonder who will win!?

 

Language