Kindergarten Newsletter, October 11

Upcoming Events/Mark your calendars:

  • Monday, October 14: No School
  • Tuesday, October 15: 8am Mass
  • Thursday,  October 17:Bring your favorite kind of apple to school!
  • Friday, October 18: Pep Rally, 2pm: wear sprit wear!

What’s Due?

  • Bring in an apple on Thursday 10/17!
  • New boom cards are posted on SEESAW in your MESSAGES; feel free to complete WITH your child.  Kids LOVE to show off all they know!

This Week:

  • We had our first field trip to the LaGrange Farmer’s Market. It was such a fun fall morning!
  • Halloween coloring pages are out at the art center at free choice time.  The kids have been loving that. The art center has been a busy place!
  • I introduced three Halloween circle time songs to the students.  We will be singin’ and dancin’ our way through October!
  • I introduced our first “elimination” circle time game this week.  I love teaching kids how to play new games and more importantly, how to be a good sport–don’t gloat if you win and don’t huff and puff if you lose!  Just enjoy playing the game!  It’s always good for kids to practice winning and losing.  We can be happy for our friends that win, give encouraging words to those that lose, and keep on trying our best to win instead of giving up! I was so impressed with them! They were such good sports, great friends and great CARDINALS!
  • We had a “$1 dress down day” on Friday.  For new families, regularly throughout the school year, our student council sponsors what we call “$1 dress down days.”  The “big kids” are out of uniform and the $1 they bring in is donated to a charitable cause chosen by the student council.  Early childhood students are welcome to participate and bring in $1 too.

Next Week:

Birthday:  We’ve been working with the students on being able to recite their birthdays.  Be sure to practice this at home! They should be able to say the month and 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/

Next week, I will introduce: D, dog, /d/ and S, snake, /s/

Remember, letters are practiced in the following formation: letter name (i), keyword/picture (itch), sound (/i/).  See this video so you fully understand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwcWjH9cumc

Fundations Home Support Pack - Level K

Mrs. Wenning's Website / Fundations

At home:

High Frequency words:  I have introduced: NO, GO, THE, YES, WE, TO, WILL, DO, A.  I didn’t get to MY this week like I had planned, so we will do that next week along with IS. We are learning how to read and spell these words. AT HOME: Please keep the word wall I sent home  last week in a safe place. These are words I want the children to be able to spell and read.  At night time, ask your child to point out some of these words in the books you’re reading!

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 ____. Now in our shared writing, there are missing letters that the children have to come up and fill in.

Read alouds: Next week we will explore nonfiction text about NUTRITION as well as fiction AND nonfiction books about apples.

Journaling:  We are getting more into journaling so let’s talk about what that looks like! Right now it is very guided.  We are working on the following:

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

2.) We are moving on from just labeling pictures (which we did in September) to writing full sentences either as “I see a ____” or “I like _________”.  The word filling in the blank comes from our writing center word cards.  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 to create that finger space.  We have lots of lefties this year so they each have a “space man” or craft stick to help them with spacing.

We will focus on this for the next month and a half and by doing this, students will become much more CONFIDENT.  Confidence is such a big part of reading and writing.  Once they’ve had a lot of guided practice, understand the skills listed above, have a solid understanding of letter/sound relationships (Fundations) and a good number of words to refer to on the word wall, we’ll move on to more independent journal writing. It’s so much fun to see their writing progress! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Math: We will continue our second math workbook, modules 4-6. We will be working on:

  • Classifying, counting and sorting.
  • We will start adding and taking away within 5. We are learning new math words: addition, plus sign, subtraction, minus sign and equal to sign.

In addition to this, we will continue to practice:

  • Tally marks: We are now representing numbers beyond 20!
  • Counting: we will now be counting by 1s up to 40!
  • 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.

Religion: We will continue our SECOND STEP program and will begin our next religion unit which is all about feelings. First up, SAD. God cares how we feel!

Science: Next week, we will continue to talk about ways to keep our bodies and minds HEALTHY. We focus on three things: Eating well, getting exercise/moving our bodies and getting rest. We will continue to talk about healthy foods and next week will focus on APPLES. On Thursday, I am asking students to bring their favorite kind of apples to school.  We will sort and graph them and then will enjoy a taste test.  We will graph which apples our friends like. We will save the rest of the apples for Friday and will make some crockpot applesauce!  Of course, we will graph whether or not we like the applesauce too!  Math sure is fun!

 

Language