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!