Kindergarten Newsletter, October 18

Upcoming Events/Mark your calendars:

  • Monday, October 21: Dining for Dollars, 5-8 at the Portillo’s in Summit
  • Thursday, October 24: $1 dress down day, wear pink

What’s Due?

  • Check out the boom cards in your SEESAW MESSAGES.

This Week:

  • We completed our second set of “monthly assessments” this week.  Students are asked to write their numbers and their names monthly.  I will share these with you at conferences!
  • Students attended the Pep Rally on Friday.  It sure was LOUD with CARDINAL spirit! Go Cardinals!
  • We completed the hearing/vision screening on Friday. Most students had vision exams on file so they just needed to complete the hearing test. If there are any concerns, you will get a note from the office.

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/

This past week we learned A and G,  NEXT week, I will introduce: D, dog, /d/ and S, snake, /s/ (oops, I was a week ahead in my last newsletter 🙂 ).  Now that we have some vowels introduced, we are starting to do some two letter blending of sounds: /a/ /t/–> AT!  /u/ /g/–> UG!

At home:

High Frequency words:  I have introduced: NO, GO, THE, YES, WE, TO, WILL, DO, A, MY.  I will introduce LIKE and AND. AT HOME: Please keep the word wall in a safe spot and practice writing these words, look for these words in books, write your child notes using these words, spell a word in the car and have your child say what it is, etc.

Shared writing: We will continue shared writing.  Students follow along as we ill 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: We will be doing some text to text comparisons next week when reading The Little Green Witch, The Little Red Hen and The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza. We will be comparing the setting, characters, problem and solution.

Journaling:  Journaling is going great!  The explicit letter formation instruction as well as the focus on pencil grip really helps the children write neatly and efficiently.  The ease with which they’re able to form their letters now makes journaling so much easier AND enjoyable!  That’s what we want! We want writing to be a FUN task for the kids. The goals for writing at this point in the year are listed below:

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 will continue our second math workbook, modules 4-6. We are 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?”  

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 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.

Religion: We will continue our SECOND STEP program and have started our next religion unit which is all about feelings. We will continue our discussion of HAPPY/SAD and move on to ANGRY next.  God cares how we feel and asks US to care how others feel too!  God gave us our feelings and those feelings matter!

Science: We will continue our unit on how to be healthy!

 

Language