Time is Flying...

So as I am sure you all know our elf, Snowflake, came last week to keep an eye on us during the holiday season and has been moving around our room since he arrived in his makeshift hot air balloon! Snowflake even left us a poster with Santa’s Tips for staying on the nice! I just know that this week we are all going to be trying very hard to stay on the nice list! Here is a picture of Snowflake when he arrived in our room and the poster he left for us!

In Unit Studies we will work on our Around the World book and will be packing/making a suitcase and getting a passport so we can start traveling the world to learn about more cultures and their celebrations. We will be traveling over the next two weeks after our afternoon recess to different countries/classrooms and learning about celebrations people have in Africa, Israel, Holland, Germany, and the United States. We will be learning about Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, the wooden shoe, the Christmas tree, and Santa. It is going to be a super fun time full of learning about different cultures – we will also learn some songs and will start practicing for our program that is Tuesday, Dec. 22nd at 1:00 in the auditorium! We hope you are all able to come!

In Math we will be continuing to talk about teen numbers and seeing the group of ten and ones. We will also be looking at different attribute cards (which is a fancy name for shapes) and will be exploring with them to sort them by color, shape, and size and we will make patterns with them too! We will also be reviewing the equals and not equals signs and comparing numbers. We will continue to tell and solve more story problems and a great time to practice story problems at home is during dinner – for example you could say “we had 6 rolls on the plate and we ate 3 of them, how many do we have left?” or “I ate 3 chicken nuggets and then had 2 more, how many chicken nuggets did I have altogether?” or you can even ask your child if they can come up with a problem of their own. 

During Literacy our essential question this week is “How can people help to make your community better” which is a wonderful topic to discuss and I am excited to hear the conversations we will have this week about pitching in and making our community the best that it can be! We will be reading the following stories – “Roadwork”, “A Community Garden”, and “The Bundle of Sticks”. In our crabby books we will be reading “I Can You Can” and in guided reading your child will either read “Can you Fix It” or “We Clean”. Our vocabulary words are community, improve, confused, harvest, and quarrel. Again this week we will be focusing on those key details of the story and answering and asking questions when we read. This is actually a review week and next week we are suppose to learn the word “my” and focus in on the letter H but we will be switching those around because next week will be a little crazy with getting ready for our program so this week we will learn about “my” and “h”! I will also be assessing quite a bit this week for report cards too! Always so much to do!

A big thank you goes out to all of the families that were able to attend Math Night last week - I sure hope you had fun playing some math games - also everyone should have received the folder full of math activities to do at home. I hope you have fun with them all! Please let me know if you have any questions! Here is a short video of your super smart Kindergarten Math Wizards and a few pictures from Family Math Night!

                          

It is sure to be a fast and fun week again in Kindergarten! I hope that Snowflake has nothing but good news to report!