End of September

We are having so much fun in kindergarten and learning so much – I can’t believe that the first quarter is almost over! These next two and half weeks we will be doing a lot of assessments to get ready for report cards and conferences! Please remember to return your conference notes this week, if you have any conflicts please just let me know – I am looking forward to talking with you and your kindergartener about all the things we are working so hard on.

In Literacy we finished up Unit 1 and are ready to start Unit 2 – Let’s Explore! Our new essential question is “How do tools help us to explore?” I can’t wait to hear the conversations we will have about tools that we use! The vocabulary words we will discuss are tools, discover, defeated, fetch, and rumble. We will be learning the word “a” which hopefully we will all already know! We will also be focusing on the letter “p” and the sound it makes. We will be reading “The Handiest Things in the World” and “Discover with Tools”. In guided reading we will either be reading “We Need Tools” or “A Trip”.

In writing we will be talking a lot about sentences and what makes a good sentence! We will be counting out the words we want to write in our stores and we will learn about spaghetti and meatball spaces and move into using finger spaces. We will also talk about punctuation marks and how at the end of every sentence we have to use a exclamation mark, question mark, or a period. My friends have been doing a great job labeling their pictures and using turtle talk to sound out words.

We took our Unit 1 math test and it went great! We will be starting Unit 2- Explore 5-groups! We will be talking about groups of 5 and finding groups of numbers – we will look at a park scene and discuss what we see and we will be learning about problem-solving strategies to solve math story problems. We will even get to act our story problems together. This week we will also be using nickel strips when we do our counting mats. I think on Monday we will also meet the “Five Finder” – a special math superhero who loves the number 5! Make sure to ask your kindergartener about the “five finder”!

We really did finish up our American Symbols unit this past week and our beautiful display is up in the hallway for you to check out! During Literacy we started talking about our five senses and learned a cool new song about how our senses are pathways to our brain. We also read some books and talked about our 5 different senses. These next two weeks during unit studies we will be focusing in on one sense for two days. We will read a book and fill out an interactive writing sheet together as a class and then the next day we will work on our 5 senses book we will be making and hopefully will be doing a fun activity to go along with the sense we are learning about! It is sure to be another fun unit!

Don't forget this Tuesday is a PLC day so we will be getting out of school at 2:18.

I am looking forward to another fun week in kindergarten!

Working so hard...

This week we will be finishing up Unit One in Math and will be taking our first math assessment, and it will be exciting! We have been practicing writing our numbers, drawing objects to show different numbers, counting objects, connecting dots in counting order, and finding objects that are the same and different!

We will also be finishing up one of my favorite units – American Symbols! We loved learning about the symbols and especially the constitution – we just have a few more left to finish up our symbols book! We have been referring  back to our kindergarten constitution and know that we always need to do our best to make our classroom the best that it can be! I am looking forward to seeing your family constitutions as well! A video from our symbols unit and Constitution Day will hopefully be coming this week sometime! Also if you are in the school building towards the end of this week please check out our hallway display featuring some of our projects, but don’t worry it will be up for awhile- once it finally gets up!

In Literacy we will be talking about our senses! We will read “Senses at the SeaShore” and “A Feast of the Senses” and in our crabby book we will read “Sam Can See” and “I Can See”. And if you haven’t guessed it yet – our new word will be “see” and we will be focusing on the letter S! Our vocabulary words that we will discuss are explore, senses, feast, finished, and kneads. We will continue to work on blending sounds together to make words and finding sounds in the beginning, middle, and at the end of words.

In writing we will continue to work on adding details and words to our stories. We will also be working on using turtle talk and our alphabet chart to sound out words! We are becoming great writers and I have been able to conference with a few friends each day to talk specifically about their writing! I can't wait to show you what your kindergartener is doing in writing at conferences in just a few short weeks!

Remember parent teacher conferences are scheduled for Tuesday, October 6th and Thursday October 8th and you had the opportunity to sign up for these at open house! But please know I will be sending home your specific date and time soon!

What another fun week we have ahead of us! Thank you all for initialing your child's kindergarten folder every night and for returning it- I hope you are enjoying it and finding it useful!

So much fun!

We are moving right along in the literacy department! We are starting week 2 of Unit 1 and our essential question is “How do baby animals move?” We will be reading and listening to some great stories called “Pouch”, “Baby Animals on the Move” and we will also read a version of “The Tortoise and the Hare”. For shared reading (in the crabby book) we will read “We Can” and “I Can, We Can” and then during guided reading when your child comes over to me at the rainbow table they will be either reading “Hop!” or “We Hop!” We are really starting to understand our guided reading routine and it is awesome to see how well they are doing with it!

We are also going to be learning the word “we” this week and focusing on the letter “a” and the sound it makes and where we hear the “a” sound in words! We will continue to work on blending sounds together to make words! Our new vocabulary words that we will be learning are: adventure, movement, arrived, exciting, and exhausted.

During writing we will continue to talk more about nouns and will keep finding nouns in sentences. I know it is crazy - nouns!! Your kindergarten will soon be able to tell you that a noun is a person, place, or thing or even an animal if they can’t already! This week is actually a very big week in writing because up until now your child has been telling stories orally and drawing pictures to go with their story – but this week we are going to learn how to label our pictures and use turtle talk to sound out the words we want to write and also how to use our alphabet chart to help us during writing time! I am very excited to see what writing has in store for our classroom this week!

In Math this week we will continue to explore numbers 1-10 with our counting mats and daily math routines and learn how to make that tricky number 5. We will also learn how to dot-to-dots with straight lines to make an object (the tricky part about this is starting at the number 1 and going in counting order).   We will also be practicing drawing groups of numbers and learning more about shapes and how to make them! We are really enjoying learning about 2 and 3 dimensional shapes! I am also so happy to see all of the homework coming back to school – the kids get super excited every time I hand homework out so I am sure hoping the enthusiasm to do homework is still there when your child gets home! A homework routine is a great thing to start in kindergarten when they enjoy it! Even on days when there is not an actual paper homework please utilize the resources you have at home in your child’s kindergarten folder to keep practicing the skills we are working on!

We are continuing to learn more about our American Symbols – we still have a lot to learn about. But this Thursday, Sept. 17^th is a super fun day for our country – it is Constitution Day! We will be learning about what the constitution is and why we have it and we will also be making our very own Kindergarten Constitution and I am hoping all of my friends will agree to it and sign it so we can have a successful school year. On this day we will be doing lots of fun crafts and you will be getting home our first family project where you will have the opportunity to create your own Family Constitution – so please look for this on Wednesday! We are really enjoying learning about our country and we are very proud to live here! On Constitution Day again please have your child wear red, white, and/or blue!

Picture Day is Wednesday, Sept. 16^th – please turn in your papers if you would like to order pictures!

I hope your child was excited about their kindergarten folder on Friday night – I am hoping this will be a great communication tool that we can use and will help keep important papers organized! Any important note I will be sending home will be in your child’s kindergarten folder and all other important notes from the office and your child’s work will still be put in your child’s Wednesday folder. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns! It is going to be another fun week in kindergarten!

Happy Grandparents Day!

On Sunday, September 13th we will celebrate a VERY important day.....Grandparent's Day!!! The kids have been telling me all week how special you are to them and all of the fun things you do together! Thank you for all you do....know you are loved. Here is a little poem for you...

GRANDPARENTS

Grandparents are special people
with wisdom and pride.
They are always offering love and kindness
and are always there to guide.
They often make you feel
so confident and strong.
Their arms are always open
no matter what you did wrong.
They try to help out
in every way that they can.
They love all their grandchildren
the same whether you're a child,

Or a woman or man.
They are always there to listen
and to lend a helping hand.
They show you respect
and they try to understand.
They give their love, devotion and so much more,
that's easy to see.
Grandparents,
what perfect examples
of the kind of person that we should be.

~By Stacy Smith~

Please enjoy the video we made for you...some of the pictures might even look familiar to you:)

I hope that all the grandparents that are still with us have a wonderful day...  :) Mrs. Woita

                     

Patriot's Day

We are so very proud of the country we live in and have enjoyed learning about our American Symbols so far. Here are a few pictures of us standing tall for our country. We are proud to be Americans!

Unit One!!!!

This next week in kindergarten is going to be a fun one because we are starting unit one in literacy which means we will be talking a lot about what good readers do! The strategy we will be focusing on is “asking and answering questions” and we will get to read a great book called “What about Bear?”. Our essential question this week is “how can we get along with new friends?” which is wonderful because we are continuing to build relationships with our new classmates and this ties in very nicely to making good choices and being respectful and responsible! We are going to be focusing on the letter “M” this week as well and will be sorting pictures that start with the sound M makes and we will also work hard on making the letter m correctly and by the end of the week we will be blending sounds together to make words! We will be making connections between all of the books we read and it is going to be a blast! We will also be putting the word “the” up on the word wall – please ask your child about the chant we do when we spell the word “the”.  Remember any extra practice you do at home will only benefit your child! We are also going to be starting guided reading (start is the key word) but please know it might take us a few weeks to get into the full guided reading routine – your child will either be reading the story “Soup” or “Mouse and Monkey” at the rainbow table with me.

In writing we will be talking about nouns – yes I know what you are thinking nouns in kindergarten - but we really do learn about them and the kids do a great job! We will learn that a noun can be a person, place, thing, or animal! We will also be focusing a lot on our pictures when we are writing our stories from our lives, because readers can find out more detailed information from our pictures. We will be talking about planning out our pictures and what we should if we don’t know how to draw things – although the most important thing to remember in kindergarten is that we always try our best! We will focus on drawing people, simple items, and even hard to draw ideas.

In Math we will be continuing to learn more about numbers but will really be focusing on the numbers 4 and 5 and how to write them. We will also be distinguishing between different sized groups and counting a certain number of objects. Last week we started talking about 2 and 3-dimensial shapes and will continue to talk about the difference between them this week too and also have some discussions about shapes and what makes something a shape! I love when the kids learn the characteristics of shapes and are able to tell me all about them! For example a triangle has three corners and three sides that are all connected and that triangles can be all different sizes and can look different. Oh how we love shapes and numbers!! We will also be having homework every single night this week so please be on the lookout!  Don’t forget to make sure your child’s name is on it so they can get credit for doing it!

In unit studies we will start a new unit!! We will start to talk about American Symbols!! The five symbols we focus on are the Bald Eagle, Statue of Liberty, American Flag, White House, and Liberty Bell. We will be reading stories, looking at pictures, and making pages for our very own American Symbol book!! This is a really fun unit and one of my favorites! This Friday, Sept. 11 is Patriot’s Day and I would love for every child in my room to wear red, white, or blue as we honor and remember our patriots.  We will be talking about how we need to stand tall and be proud of the country that we live in! I truly feel so lucky to live in this country!

I have been working hard on getting our kindergarten folders ready to send home – so I sure hope you get to see them sometime this week. This will be a form of communication between school and home and will have important information in it, as well as things your child can practice with at home!

I know it is going to be another fun, fast, and busy week in our classroom! I hope you all enjoyed the long weekend!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DIEGO!

Today was a very special day in kindergarten, because our friend, Diego, turned 6! This was the first birthday since we have started kindergarten and it was a little crazy this morning in our classroom. For the past few years I have had an elf - yep I said elf - come to my classroom during the holidays to keep an eye on my students while they are at school. Some of you may have heard of the "Elf on the Shelf" tradition and boy does Mrs. Woita love when Snowflake (our elf) is watching because my friends are always on their very best behavior. But... last year I heard about Santa giving special permission to some of his elves to help come and celebrate birthdays because Santa loves birthdays too! So I wrote Santa a letter asking if we could have an elf come and help celebrate birthdays in my classroom and guess what? CONFETTI the elf CAME! He was even dressed up in his birthday suit! The kids were so excited to read the book he left about the birthday tradition! Confetti was so silly he left confetti all over Diego 's desk and all over the carpet (although Mrs. Woita might have to write another note about the confetti and maybe keeping it at the north pole next time but we will see what Confetti thought of it - since he was watching us all day long too). I sure hope Diego had a great day too! This morning we all thought of words to describe Diego and Mrs. Woita made him a little gift from all of us - we sure hope he likes it! Here are a few pictures from our fun day!

Diego's desk and crown.

A note left for Diego and the book The Elf on the Shelf - A Birthday Tradition!

Birthday boy, Diego, and Confetti, our birthday elf!

Diego and his friends!