Happy Thanksgiving!

I wanted to let you all know how very thankful I am...
I am blessed with a healthy family and a job that I love! I am so thankful that I get to work with your children every day! I wanted to share this poem with you all and tell you that I hope that I can be the kind of teacher that teaches your child the importance of being thankful...

Be Thankful

Be thankful that you don’t already have everything you desire,
If you did, what would there be to look forward to?

Be thankful when you don’t know something
For it gives you the opportunity to learn.

Be thankful for the difficult times.
During those times you grow.

Be thankful for your limitations
Because they give you opportunities for improvement.

Be thankful for each new challenge
Because it will build your strength and character.

Be thankful for your mistakes
They will teach you valuable lessons.

Be thankful when you’re tired and weary
Because it means you’ve made a difference.

It is easy to be thankful for the good things.
A life of rich fulfillment comes to those who are
also thankful for the setbacks.

GRATITUDE can turn a negative into a positive.
Find a way to be thankful for your troubles
and they can become your blessings.

Author Unknown

I hope you all enjoy the long weekend!  Please enjoy the video we made!

                            
                      

Short week!

This week will be a quick one- we will be going turkey crazy and talking a lot about the things we are thankful for! Tuesday is a PLC day so it will be a super fast day! If we survive these two days and all the things on the to do list we will all deserve a break!  Although I am sure hoping for a little bit of free time because I have quite a few funny turkey books I know my friends would love!

Queen Gabbi

Gabbi was the Queen of the Jungle this week and it was a great week! Gabbi likes purple and yellow and playing soccer. Her favorite movie is Frozen and her favorite song of course is "Let it Go" so we had to sing and watch the video and all the kids loved it! Gabbi made us all laugh when she told us her favorite food is candy! Gabbi also loves zebras and when she is at home she likes to play games. She is a special kid because she is funny which is so true! This week Gabbi's grandma came in and read us a story which was so much fun - Gabbi even got to read us a story too! When Gabbi grows up she wants to be a teacher! Gabbi was a wonderful Queen! Please check out her video!

                      

Moving Right Along...

It is the middle of November and we are moving right along. We are starting a new unit in Literacy and in Math! My friends did great on their Unit 2 math test and are excited to keep learning more about numbers. Unit 3 will review and build upon our knowledge of numbers 1-10. We will be focusing on teen numbers and seeing that there is one group of ten in every teen number. This week we will be introduced the to “ten bug” who LOVES the number 10. We will continue to work with 5-groups and if we are lucky we will maybe have one more visit from the 5-finder this week! We will also be learning about number partners and how a number is a whole that can be easily separated into partners! Ms. Carli will also be teaching us about different strategies that we can use to solve story problems! Oh how I LOVE math – it truly is so fun to see my friends learning more about numbers!

In Literacy we will be starting Unit 4 “Around the Neighborhood”. This week our essential question is “What do people use to do their jobs?” and I can’t wait to hear the conversations we will have! Our vocabulary words are equipment, uniform, expect, remained, and utensils. We will be reading “Whose Shoes?” and “Workers and Their Tools”, which are both informational texts that give us real information and many times include photographs.  We will also be reading “Little Juan and the Cooking Pot” and in our crabby book we will read “Tom on Top”.  During guided reading your child will either be reading “ You Cook” or “On the Job”. We will be focusing on the letter “o” and learning the word “you” this week as well. As always we will blending sounds together to make words and also taking a word and sounding it out slowly - which ties in so nicely with what we have been working on in writing. We will also focus a lot on ending punctuation marks and how our voices sound when we read them.  We will also be learning that an adjective is a describing word that tells us more about something! For example when we are writing about going down the slide at the park we could say we that we go down the big, red, curvy slide at the park! 

We will be finishing up our sink or float books this week too. We have had way too much fun experimenting at school and from what I hear my friends are having fun experimenting at home as well!

We have another fun week ahead of us!

King Cody

Cody was the King of the Jungle this week – and he had an awesome week! Cody’s favorite color is blue and he likes tee-ball. His favorite food is pizza and he loves tigers! His favorite song and movie is Pokemon and he even shared his very rare Pokemon toy with us. His favorite book is “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut” by Dr. Suess and we loved reading it – my friends laughed almost the whole time! He is a special kid because he is the funniest, cutest kid and is very good at making funny faces! Cody likes to play his DS and minecraft when he is at home. When he grows up he wants to be a teacher like Mrs. Woita :). Cody was a wonderful King of the Jungle – please check out his video!

                   

Veterans Day!

On Tuesday, Nov. 11th we celebrated a very important day in our country, Veterans Day! I talked with my friends about how much the women and men have sacrificed for our country to keep us safe and free. We are so thankful for all of the veterans and for all the men and women who are still serving our country! We are truly so lucky to live in America! Words cannot express our gratitude for all that they have done for us. Every passing day I admire and appreciate our veterans even more.

This year the kindergarten teachers at Meadow Lane challenged our students to bring in candy that they got from Halloween to share with the Veterans in our community. I was amazed at how much candy my friends brought in. We had a blast bagging up the candy to share with others. We also made turkey cards that were made with our hands and feet with the words "from our hands down to our feet we say thanks for keeping us free!" and I will be taking them along with our bags of candy to the veterans hospital this weekend to share with them. A few of my friends even took some home to give to the veterans that they know! Please check out this short video we made in honor of Veterans Day.

                      

Practice Makes Perfect

Your child brought home a packet of papers on Friday and I explained that all of these papers will help us practice the skills we have been working so hard on in kindergarten! I showed them all how to put the papers in their binders so they can practice over and over again :)

Please continue to use the alphabet chart to practice the letters and sounds, we have been working hard to blending sounds together to make words, especially in writing. 

 We are continuing to work hard on making all of the letters correctly – if you notice your child is consistently writing letters or numbers backwards please use these strokes to help your child!

The blue sheet of words are all of the words we are learning in the 2^nd quarter – remember my friends need to be able to read and write these words! Please ask your child to tell you the chants we use for each word. It is still good to practice our 1st quarter words as well!

This yellow sheet is full of activities to use with the colored boxes. Of course you can always make up your own activities. We use something very similar to this everyday during daily math routines to practice writing our numbers in isolation.

We are focusing on our numbers 1-10 and it is so important to be able to write them – please use this sheet to have your child practice.

This week we will be taking our Unit 2 math test – so any extra practice you do at home would be awesome! We will be reviewing this week in preparation for our test!

We are having soo much fun experimenting with different objects to see if they will sink or float. We did our own experiments and watched a video of Cookie Monster testing out different objects. We learned words like hypothesis, displacement, and density – geez we are sure learning lot in kindergarten! We will continue to learn more about why objects sink or float. I sure hope you had fun experimenting at home!

In Literacy we will start Week 3 of Unit 3. We will be reading “Please Take Me For A Walk” and “Field Trips” and will be talking about the different places we go during the week and also focusing on the character, setting, and events that happen in the stories. In our crabby books we will be reading “We Go To See Nan” and “Can We Go?” We will be focusing on the letter c and learning how to read and write the word go! Our vocabulary words will be neighborhood, routine, intelligent, local, and volunteer. During guided reading your child will either be reading “We Can Go” or “Going by Cab”. During writer’s workshop we are continuing to write stories from our lives and are working hard on sounding out words that we don’t know how to spell using turtle talk.

Please have your child wear red, white, and blue on Tuesday – because we will be observing Veterans Day and will be making a few things for our Veterans and of course taking some pictures for this special day.  What a busy week we have ahead of us!

Sharing is Caring

This week we started our new wellness challenge - which challenges us to do nice things for others and to help out in different ways. I sure hope you are all enjoying filling out your challenge sheets at home. I love talking with my friends about different ways we can fill up people's buckets! We know that when we fill up other peoples buckets it fills up our bucket at the same time. What a wonderful feeling it is to help others and put a smile on their face! I am hoping you all have good helpers at home this weekend because all my friends told me that they would be working extra hard to help out at home!
This week I had so many friends bring in candy for the Veterans  - next week we will be bagging it up and making a special gift for the Veterans! This week we also started our Food Drive here at Meadow Lane and it is our goal to bring in 100 items of food for the Food Drive - and so far we have 24 items so I am hoping that we can continue to bring in some more food for this very worthy cause!
Our friend Josiah is in a cast this week as I am sure you all heard and at the beginning of the week was in crutches and all of my friends did such an amazing job helping him out. He wanted to do something nice for his friends so he bought popcorn for the entire class - so if you are wondering why your quarters returned home that is the reason. I know that my friends will continue to help out Josiah until he gets his cast off. There are so many times throughout the day that my friends are helping out others and it truly does bring a smile to my face. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend with your families!

Queen Chloe

This week Chloe was the Queen of the Jungle and she had a fabulous week! Chloe loves the color pink and swimming. She brought in her Pete the Cat stuffed animal and her favorite book Pete the Cat and his Four Groovy Buttons - which we all loved reading and we even got to watch a little bit of the book on the internet! We all do love Pete the Cat! Chloe's favorite book is Frozen and she loves the song "Let It Go" of course! She also likes mac n' cheese and giraffes! She is special kid because her family loves her so very much and when she is at home she likes to play in her room. When she grows up she wants to be a teacher just like her mom! Chloe loved being the Queen of the Jungle... please check out her special video!

                      

Fall Fun...

Last week we had quite the time with Mrs. Schroeder and Mrs. Mach’s friends. We decorated pumpkins which we hope you love, we also got to clean out a pumpkin – one of which was a magic pumpkin (as I am sure you have heard about), we planted the seeds and they grew over night! On Friday we started our day off finding our pumpkins and then later on in the afternoon we played games and decorated monsters. It really was a lot of fun – please check out these videos so you can see a glimpse of our fun times… also a special thank you goes out to all of my adult volunteers that made our afternoon go so much smoother... THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!

 

                       

                                            a little photo booth fun..
                        

Fall Back... the time has officially changed!

The time has changed and hopefully you all enjoyed your extra hour of sleep as much as I did! This week we will be trying to get back into our normal routine after the super fun week we had last week! Although we will be gearing up for Veterans Day and Thanksgiving will be here before we know it. Last week you should have gotten a "candy challenge" paper in your child's Wednesday Folder - we will be collecting candy this week to give to the Veterans - I am hoping we will be collecting a lot... my friends always say "sharing is caring"!

In Literacy we will be starting Week 2 in Unit 3. Our essential question is “What are the different sounds we hear?” and we will be reading a super fun book called “Clang! Clang! Beep! Beep! Listen to the City” and also “The Turtle and the Flute”. We are learning about different genres of books and also strategies that readers use – we are getting really good at visualizing the pictures in our mind.  In our crabby books we will be reading “Nat and Tip” and “Tim and Nan”, and let me tell you we really enjoy reading those crabby books! We will be focusing on the letter “Nn” and learning how to read, write, and spell the word “and”. Our vocabulary words this week are listen, volume, chat, exclaimed, and familiar.  We are continuing to work on finding words that rhyme and sorting words by the beginning and ending sounds. We are getting really good at blending words with turtle talk and like writing down the sounds we hear in our sound boxes! This week I will be sending home a few things to put in your binders for you to practice with at home!

In Math we will be practicing writing the number 10 as well as making patterns and showing numbers 1-10 on our counting mats. We will continue to solve addition and subtraction story problems and try and come up with our own problems. We are getting really good at repeating story problems so we know what the problem is asking us. We will also be looking at addition and subtraction equations closely to see what patterns we find. 

In writing we will be go over what we should do if our friends try to help us spell words (we are working very hard on becoming independent writers) and also talking about how sometimes we spell the same words differently and how that is okay! We will learn that good writers touch(point) to their words and reread while they are writing their sentences to make sure that they make sense and also remembering to use punctuation marks at the end of each sentence.

During Unit Studies we finished up our drug safety unit and will now be starting our science unit – Sink or Float! Be prepared to test things at home – I just know that my friends will love experimenting and making predictions about what objects will sink to the bottom and which objects will float! I can’t wait to see all of the fun we have during this unit!

On Friday your child should have given you their report cards along with the pumpkins, toys, and snacks! Sorry I can only imagine your Friday evening when that backpack opened up – that is if you even got the backpack opened up on Friday -I know at my house it was crazy- what a busy day we had! Please let me know if you have any questions about your child’s report card – you get to the keep the actual report card but please send back the envelope so we can reuse it. I told my friends that 3’s are what we are looking for and that 2’s just mean we need to keep working hard and trying our best every day!

Hopefully this week I will be getting a video up of our fun Fall Party! Also please be on the lookout for the November calendar and note for Book It and also for the papers to put in your binder this week! We have another fun week ahead of us!