Upcoming Events/Mark your Calendars:
- Tuesday, October 4: 8am Mass
- Tuesday, October 4: Pet Blessing, 4-5pm
- Wednesday, October 5: Bring in your favorite kind of apple; see science section below
- Thursday, October 6: Picture Day
- Friday, October 7: Hearing screening for kindergarten
What’s Due:
- Volunteering: If you wish to volunteer at St. Cletus School, please make sure you complete the following requirements. We will have two classroom volunteer opportunities in October. Get these requirements completed! https://stcletusschool.com/volunteering/
- Let’s Connect: Consider following St. Cletus on social media! In particular, please look for St. Cletus on Facebook and join “Mrs. Mahr: kindergarten is sweet” group on Facebook. There are some great pictures of your children posted already! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oKa8aFuzj8uv9iUc_EWtaD-5zUML5Fa9/view?usp=sharing
- Hot lunch: Don’t forget to place your weekly hot lunch orders!
- Seesaw: Be sure you’re logged into seesaw. Check your MESSAGES to find boom card links. These links will be active for 2 weeks, then I will send new ones!
- Picture day forms: be sure to submit these forms online. NOTHING needs to be turned in to me. It’s all done online.
- We are all set with chaperones for our upcoming field trip. Acceptance notes went home. The 7 chaperones for the trip are: Grown-ups of- Ian and Trinity Mendoza, Mary Cate King, Tess Napleton, Mario Sosa, Marco Licavoli, Amaya Carradero, Alex Murray.
- Scholastic Book Club: You can place online orders using our class code, H2NGF; https://clubs.scholastic.com/
This Week:
We celebrated our friend Stephen this week! He turned 6 on September 24th. Thanks for sharing smiley face cookies with us. Yum!
Next Week:
Language Arts:
- Jolly Phonics: We will finish GROUP 4 sounds next week with j, oa, ie, ee, or. We are practicing top to bottom letter formation and also the sounds and actions. We will begin to put sounds together to make words. We will practice “stretching” and “tapping” out words and will “write the sounds we hear.”
- Phonemic awareness: Daily phonemic awareness exercises are an important part of our day! We are now working on isolating the beginning sounds, listening for rhyming words, replacing parts of words and deleting parts of words. This is all ORAL practice. They’re getting really good at it! I really push them for participation because phonemic awareness is VERY important for our beginning readers and writers!
- Word wall words: Our current word wall has: do, go, no, the, we, will, yes, you, I see; next week, I will introduce like, to
- Write the room: “I see” sentences” and they will be searching for word wall word apples.
- Read alouds: we are working on “making connections” to stories using the phrase, “this reminds me of…”; we will also be identifying the CHARACTERS and SETTING in stories. We will read both fiction and nonfiction stories about apples. We will learn that nonfiction “teaches us about something”.
Math:
Chapter 2 Go Math workbooks went home on Friday. If your child has been absent, expect it to go home next week after work is made up. We will begin Chapter 3 next week!
- Number formation: the children are doing a great job with their number formation! It’s important to get this down so when we really start manipulating numbers they don’t have to put so much effort into the formation which could become frustrating. Instead they can focus on the math skill at hand! AT HOME: number+formation+reference+sheet 7
- Counting by 1s to 40. AT HOME: practice counting by 1s as high as your child can go. Take turns! You (or a sibling) start, and go back and forth. The car is a great place to do this! They’ve got no where to go. 🙂
- Writing numbers to 20.
- using > < = to compare numbers
- 1 to 1 Counting of a group of objects: one math center will be grab and count next week; they will have to grab cubes from a bag, count and write the number.
- Classify objects
- Finding Shapes in Environment and Describe Positions (above, below, beside, etc)
- Identify 2-D Shapes (different orientations/sizes)
- Patterning: creating, finishing and labeling
- Tally marks: representing a number using tally marks. We will practice making “bundles of 5” and “groups of ten”; doing this really helps children improve their number sense and understanding of tens and ones.
- Ten frame: We are using a double ten frame to represent teen numbers. Below is the number “14.” AT HOME: Please consider printing out (or just create your own if you don’t have a printer) this ten frame and double ten frame. We use foam counters, but you can use any small manipulative at home. M and Ms, cheerios–those work great! Ask your child to show you “10”, “14” “20” etc.; once your child gets that down, start asking questions like “how many more to get to 10?” “how many more to get to 20?” “How many groups of ten and how many ones in that number?” double ten frame mats
Religion: We will wrap up our unit on Baptism. The children loved having a chance to share their special baptism or religious mementos. Kids love when they have that moment in the spotlight. 🙂 Thank you for helping your child prepare! On Friday afternoon, we visited church and said a prayer at the baptismal font in our church. Next week, we will begin our unit on CREATION. This will be the first story that we read from the Bible. We will learn a new song about creation and will illustrate and mark word wall words in our poetry journals.
Science: We will begin our unit on Apples and Healthy eating. This is in preparation for our field trip to the La Grange Farmer’s Market. We will learn about the cycle of an apple, we will compare the weight of apples to other classroom objects and much more! On Wednesday, October 5th, I am asking the children to bring in their favorite apple. We will graph the apples, we will taste test and tally our favorites and finally, we will use the remaining apples to make crockpot applesauce. We will begin to talk about what healthy eating looks like and how different fruits and vegetables grow—above ground, below ground, do they grow on trees, bushes, are they root vegetables, etc.