Upcoming Events/Mark your calendars:
- Tuesday, November 19: 8am Mass
- Thursday, November 21st: Kindergarten Blessing’s Feast: you do NOT need to bring a lunch today!!! I’ll send a reminder the day before.
Looking Ahead/mark your calendars: There are some important events coming up and I want to make sure you have these marked down! 🙂
- Tuesday, November 26: PT conferences and 11:00am dismissal
- Friday, December 20: This will be our Christmas Kindergarten performance day! Please mark your calendars and plan to attend! 🙂 Here is the plan: Mass will be at 9:30, prepared by the kindergarten and 8th grade. Immediately following the 9:30 Mass, students will get on the altar to present their songs and poems. The Mass and presentation will go until about 11:00. After this, students will return to school for lunch and then have a birthday party for Baby Jesus beginning at 12:45. We will need 5 volunteers for this event, so stay tuned for more information in December. We will ask parents that had a chance to help out at the Halloween party to wait for 1 day before signing up to volunteer at the Christmas party just so we know everyone has a chance to volunteer. 🙂 Don’t forget, this is also an early 2pm dismissal day.
What’s Due:
- Thank you for signing up for P/T conferences! If anything changes with your holiday plans/schedule, just reach out and I’d be happy to fit you in after school one day. Otherwise, I look forward to meeting with you all on the 26th!
- Stuffed animal slumber party form due: This is an FSA sponsored event. Please turn in your child’s stuffed animal along with $5 and the form (this was in your Wednesday envelope last week) by November 22nd!
- Thanks to all that sign up to donate something for our kindergarten “blessings feast!” If anyone is at the store and sees the ready to mash potatoes and can grab a few bags, that would be great! That’s the only thing we still need. 🙂 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f0FhCiOy5dTlJs68RrZgLIG0SK4Id6Df/edit
This Week:
What a busy week! The kids had a blast with all the “extra stuff” happening this week at school. We attended the Veteran’s Day Mass on Monday, the Lyons Township choral concert in church on Thursday, a dental presentation on Friday and then the Farmer Brown election promise activity took place Friday afternoon! Such fun stuff! Lots of smiles, laughing and excitement. Kindergarten ROCKS!
Great job with the Mrs. Field’s Fundraiser! Kindergarten raised over $700 and as a school, we raised $13,157. Way to go, Cardinals!
Next Week:
We will be VERY busy getting ready for the kindergarten Thanksgiving Feast on Thursday! We will be making hats and doing lots of cooking to prepare for this special day.
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/
- p, pan, /p/
- j, jug, /j/
- l, light /l/
- k, kite /k/
- h, hat, /h/
We will not be introducing any new letters/sounds this week.
High Frequency words: I have introduced: NO, GO, THE, YES, WE, TO, WILL, DO, A, MY, LIKE, AND, HAVE YOU and color words RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, PURPLE, WHITE, PINK, BLACK, BROWN. We will continue to practice color words and I will also introduce: IT, IF, IN; our new “write the room” center will now be writing sentences with COLOR WORDS!
Writing: We will be starting interactive writing! Each student will have a chance to generate his/own sentences and as a class, we will write this sentence together on the smartboard and on individual white boards. This is a great warm-up to their journaling where they’ll be expected to write one sentence independently.
Read alouds: We will continue with Thanksgiving read alouds and also Thanksgiving books at the 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.
Journaling: We have a few more days of writing “I see” and “I like” sentences and then will transition to students generating and writing about their own topics of choice. A sentence that a student dictates may sound like this: “I went to my grandma’s house.” In kindergarten writing, that sentence may look like this: “I wnt to my gramus hos.” We are looking for students to correctly spell word wall words (I, to, my) and then “write the sounds they hear” in all other words (went, grandma’s house). Correct spelling will come later as they learn more and more phonics rules. When a student writes the kindergarten way, we call that “brave spelling” or “inventive spelling.” We want to build CONFIDENT writers and that will not happen if they rely on the question, “how do you spell _____?” They will hear the phrase, “write the sounds you hear” OFTEN in kindergarten! Please do this at home too!
Math: We are beginning modules 7-9 which is all about:
- 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 forward from a given number.
- Identifying a greater number of objects (within 10).
- Identifying a lesser number of objects (within 10).
- Comparing groups within ten.
We will also continue to practice:
- tallying, graphing and sorting!
Religion: We will continue to add feathers to our “thankful turkeys.” Each feather will have one thing that we are thankful to God for!