The Holiday Spirit is Here...

I hope that you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving and my friends had a good break. I also hope that they are ready to get back to school and are ready for a fun, fast 16 days! We will be doing a lot over the next 3 weeks and we don't have any time to waste!

I am thinking that one of Santa's scout elves will probably be coming to keep an eye on us during this crazy time to make sure we all stay on the nice list! Our elf, George, came to my house this past weekend to keep on eye on Henry, Lily, and Macy so I am sure Snowflake will be arriving anyday now to keep watch over my friends while they are here at school! I am crossing my fingers for excellent behavior because like I said we have lots to do!

In Literacy we will be focusing on the letter d and the word "do". Our vocabulary words are appreciate, culture, prefer, proud, and tradition. We will be reading "What Can You Do With a Paleta?", "Cultural Festivals", "A World of Festivals", and in our crabby books we will read "Sid" and in guided reading your child will read either "Neighborhood Party" or "Parade Day". If we can squeeze in any holiday books we will be doing that too! We will work on our comprehension skills as well when we are reading stories and will be talking about the character, setting, and the events that take place throughout the book. We will be blending and segmenting words and also reading silly/nonsense words this week to get ready for our Quarter 2 assessments!

In writing we will be continuing to learn more about what good writer's do - the CAPS man really helps us remember that every sentence starts with a Capital letter, we need Art work to match our story, also Punctuation marks go at the end of every sentence, and between every word we need Spaces!

In math we will be working hard on learning those teen numbers, we are going to practice solving and telling oral story problems and again reviewing the different strategies we can use to solve story problems. We will be exploring with a balance to compare how much things weigh and we will be using vertical and horizontal graphs to show our results! We will also be talking a lot about number partners and working on our counting mats!

In Unit Studies we are starting one of my favorite units (I know that I say that about all of the units but this one really is a good one) we will start learning about People and Celebrations. It is so neat to talk about our own family traditions around the holidays but also so neat to talk about how different cultures celebrate. We will be making a booklet and talking about what we might see if we were to actually travel around the world! It is sure to be a fun busy week!

Please make sure you are free to come to our Celebrations Around the World Program on Tuesday, Dec. 22nd at 1:00 in the auditorium. You will be getting an invitation soon but wanted to give you a heads up that it will probably last around 30 minutes. I hope that you are all able to make it!

I can't believe it is December and we are almost done with the second quarter of kindergarten!
Also Ms. Shipley's last day is this Friday - December 4th - which is super crazy and I know all of my friends will miss her so very much as will I because I don't know how I will ever manage without her - she helps us all out so much each and every day- so hopefully we will have a super great week since it is her last week with us!

Also please remember that this Thursday, December 3rd is our Family Math Night from 5:30-6:30. I hope you all can make it to this fun family night!

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! 

                    

Happy Birthday Jaxson!

Yesterday was Jaxson's 6th birthday and oh boy were we all excited to see Confetti, the birthday elf! He left confetti on Jaxson's desk and even wrote him a note on the board!  We all had a great time using adjectives to describe Jaxson to make his present! Jaxson had a great day and is super excited to now be 6 years old! Here are a few pictures of Jaxson's day at school!

Jaxson's friends singing him Happy Birthday!

Jaxson with his friends and his gift from all of us!

Jaxson and Confetti!

Jaxson and the note Confetti left for him! 

(we all agreed we need to help Confetti learn how to write letters the right way!)

Queen Leina

Leina was our Queen of the Jungle last week and she had a wonderful week! Her dad was able to come in and read one of her favorite books Pigsty which was super funny, she also likes the book Shapes. We all loved the book Leina's dad read to us! But back to Queen Leina - she likes the color blue and volleyball and lions. Her favorite food is Lucky Charms and she also likes the movie Olivia and her favorite song is Twinkle Twinkle. Leina is a special girl because she is just the way God made her! When she is at home she likes to play with dolls and when she grows up she wants to be a teacher! I know she will make a great teacher! Here is a video of her week as Queen!

                     

Crazy Busy 2 Days!!

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!

Thank you Veterans!

On Wednesday, 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.

            

New units in November!

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! We will also learn 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! Remember math night is Thursday, December 3rd and I hope you all can come!

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 working on our sink and float books this week! I now we will love experimenting more this week because last week we each got to pick one item to experiment with and we had soo much fun! Be prepared to do some experimenting at home as well! We will be learning words like hypothesis, displacement, and density – geez we will sure be learning lot in kindergarten this week!!

Also if you ordered cookie dough for the school fundraiser- please make sure to come pick it up this Wednesday from 4-6!!

Queen Aubrey

This week Aubrey was the Queen of the Jungle and she loved every minute of it! She was our first Queen and we loved learning more about her! Aubrey loves the color pink and the movie Frozen! She also likes gymnastics and enchiladas! Her favorite animal is a horse and her favorite song is Hillsong-Alive! Her favorite book is "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and her mom even cam in and read it to us and we all loved listening to her read! She is a special girl because Jesus loves her and when she is at home she likes to play school and wants to be a teacher when she grows up - which of course makes Ms. Shipley and Mrs. Woita very happy to hear! We know Aubrey will be a great teacher someday! Here is a video of her week as Queen!

                 

Parent Readers this Week!

This week we were lucky enough to have two parent readers come and read to us. Aubrey's mom came in on Thursday to read and have lunch with the Queen of the Jungle, Aubrey, and Harper's mom was signed up to read today - so we were extra lucky this week! Here are a few pictures of our special guest parent readers!

 Harper and her mom!

 Harper's mom getting ready to read and asking us questions about Charlie Brown!

 Harper does love listening to her mom read!

 Harper's mom read "You've got Talent, Charlie Brown".

 Harper's mom even stayed for lunch!

 Aubrey was so excited her mom came to read!

 Everyone loved this book!

 Aubrey loves this book AND her mom!

 Aubrey's mom read her favorite book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" (it was a super small book).

Aubrey's mom with our whole class!

Practice Makes Perfect!

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! I know all of my friends will do great!

We will also be starting our science unit – Sink or Float! Please 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!

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 Wednesday – 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. Last week I had so many friends bring in candy for the Veterans and this week we will be bagging it up and making a special gift for the Veterans! Please let me know if you have a veteran or veterans you would like to have a bag of candy and card for and I will send it home with your child. 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 25 items so I am hoping that we can continue to bring in some more food for this very worthy cause! Friday was “Hats for Hunger Day” and we had quite a few fun hats in our room!

Also this week a turkey will be coming home with your child – don’t worry it is just a paper turkey - this is a fun family project that you can do together and send back to school. All of the directions and turkey will come home in your child’s kindergarten folder! I can’t wait to see what the turkeys look like when they come back!

Speaking of kindergarten folders – your wonders online access sheet was added in on Friday as well as a practice sheet for spelling words and kindergarten words. Please know that any extra practice you can do at home will only benefit your child! Remember you will now be seeing two literacy homework sheets that will need to be done with a homework helper! Please let me know if you have any questions! 

Also a BIG thank you to all of you that were able to come to reading night last week. I hope you all had fun and learned a little about our kindergarten literacy curriculum! It really is crazy what kindergarteners do now and how much it has changed! Please mark down Thursday, December 3^rd from 5:30-6:30 on your calendar because that is Math Night and I hope to have some more fun activities planned for that evening as well and hope you all can come. Please check out the video we made for reading night with a few more pictures added in! I hope you all had a fabulous weekend!

                   

King Nolan

Nolan was our King of the Jungle this week and he had a fabulous week! We all found out that he LOVES Star Wars! He loves the movie and the theme song and he even brought in his super cool lightsaber to show us that was awesome! His favorite book is called "Goodnight Darth Vader" and his favorite animal is a wookie! Nolan also likes the color red, football,  and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He is a special kid because he has a family that loves him very much! Something Nolan likes to do at home is collect baseball cards and when he grows up he wants to be a teacher! I know that Nolan will be able to do whatever he sets his mind to! He is a great student who works hard every single day and he had a wonderful week as the King of the Jungle! Here is a video of him as our King!

                  

First week of November!!!

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!

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!

Last Wednesday you also should have received your child's report card.  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!

This Thursday is our Family Reading night from 5:30-6:30 in our classroom and you should have received information on that as well! It should be a great night to learn more about the literacy activities we do everyday! I hope to see you all there! Hopefully this week I will also be getting a video up of our fun Fall Party! Also please be on the lookout for the November calendar and quarter 2 skills that will be put in your child's kindergarten folder! We have another fun week ahead of us!