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!