News for the Week of September 24th

Fall is here!  Well, Texas style fall.  It was nice to have some cooler mornings this week.  It will be great when the humidity goes away!  The Monkeys told me one morning, "It's cold!"  Haha!  They are definitely living in Texas.

In math this week, we continued our unit on Sorting and Classifying/2D & 3D Shapes.  The students learned more about squares, circles and rectangles this week.  We discussed how many sides they had, how many points or corners and we learned about curved lines and straight lines.  We sorted many shapes, as well as pictures of numbers and letters into the categories, "straight lines," "curved lines," or "both."  We have continued to enjoy our math stations and guided math.  We will continue working with shapes and sorting next week.

In language arts, we read the poem, What Is It?, and focused on the sight word, "it."  We wrote the word "it" several times and looked for rhyming words in our poem.  We worked on making and reading many emergent reader books this week to add to our book boxes.  These books are early readers for students and will be fun for them to read to their reading buddies.  We look forward to meeting our 3rd grade reading buddies this upcoming Friday afternoon.  Kindergarten and third grade will get to read with each other every Friday afternoon this year!  Mrs. Morris was busy assessing students to help prepare for the fall conferences the week of October 8th.  We will be able to see your child's strengths and look at areas to work on this year.  Next week in language arts, we will integrate social studies and read and learn about a few people in history that helped contribute to our nation and state.  During our word study, we played the alphabet soup game with the letters in our name with partners.  It was fun to draw letters from the "soup" bowl and determine if they were in our name or our partner's name.  We also listened to stories that had rhyming words and identified those words.  We then thought of other words that could rhyme, too.  In writing, we continued our stories and began new stories.  We focused on sounding our the words we wanted in our stories.  We also watched Mrs. Morris write stories and focus on spaces in between words and return sweep at the end of a line.  Our class also continued work in our handwriting book and worked on the forming the letters O, Q and G.  

In science, we began our unit Heat Causes Change.  We had to come up with ideas of how to get teddy bear counters that were frozen in ice out of the ice.  The students told me to put one in the sun, put one in a bowl of water, use the hair dryer on one and to use the body heat from our hands on another one.  We were surprised that the teddy bear ice cube that we put in the water melted faster than the one we used the hair dryer on.

Our class discussed ways to make popsicles with some apple juice I had in the classroom.  We finally decided to pour some in little cups and put a popsicle stick in them.  We put them in the freezer and the next day we observed how they froze.  Then the students enjoyed the popsicles outside and noticed how their body heat melted them back to the liquid form.

We recorded our observations in our science notebooks.  We had the most fun this week making applesauce on Friday!  The students felt a piece of apple with their hands.  We then took other cut up apples and added them to a crock pot with water, sugar and cinnamon.  We turned on the heat and got to see how heat changed the apples.  We enjoyed yummy applesauce at the end of the day!

We will finish our unit on changes from heating and cooling next week.

We really had a lot of fun on Friday doing activities centered around apples all day long!  We made a book about apples, we created an apple from construction paper and labeled the parts of the apple, we listened to nonfiction books about apples, we tasted a piece of red, green and yellow apples & voted on our favorite (red won) and we did some apple math!

The Monkeys are looking forward to learning all about our superstar student, Luka, next week!

Reminders

If you are able to contribute to the class parties/100th day & Zero the Hero prizes fund and have not yet, please send back the letter with your check for Jeanette Dunbar and I will get it to her.  This fund helps pay for each of our 3 parties this year and all of the Zero the Hero prizes and the 100th day of school activities.  Thank you!

Please be sure to check out the "Dates to Remember" below. 

Upcoming Dates to Remember: 

Oct. 8        Student Holiday/Parent~Teacher Fall Conferences
Oct. 9        Student Holiday
Oct. 12      PTA Movie Night, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Oct. 17      Bush's Chicken Spirit Night, 4-7 p.m.
Oct. 19      Kona Ice, after school

Superstars & Birthdays:

Morris Superstar:

Luka!

Morris September Birthdays:

Siddhant-10/24

Happy Birthday Ethan!

News for the Week of September 17th

We had another great week in kindergarten!  We started off the week celebrating Constitution Day on Monday which is observed every year on September 17th.  We discussed what our constitution for our country is and why it is important.  We even wrote up our own school constitution.  The students told me what they wanted me to write down for this constitution.  I apologize for not taking many pictures this week.  I hope to take more next week to add to our blog.

In math this week, we finished our unit on Developing a Sense of Quantities to 10.  We had fun making our names on a ten frame.  They are hanging up in our hallway, so be sure to come and check them out!  We then began our new unit about Sorting and Classifying/2D and 3D Shapes.  We learned to sort pictures of a variety of objects and various objects based on their attributes.  We began learning about 2D shapes by focusing on the triangle and going on a shape hunt for triangles in our classroom.  We will continue to learn about more 2D shapes, as well as straight lines and curved lines next week.

In language arts, we read the poem, I Can!, and focused on the sight word, "I."  We wrote the word "I" several times and looked for rhyming words in our poem.  We read the book My Friend Rabbit by Eric Rohmann and Julius, Baby of the World by Kevin Henkes and focused on learning about characters.  We learned that characters are the people or animals in a story that talk and have actions.  We recorded a picture of our favorite character from each story in our reading response journals.  We also read Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Rainbow Fish and the Big Blue Whale by Marcus Pfister to learn about setting.  We learned that setting is where a story takes place or happens.  The students then drew and colored a picture of the setting from both books in their reading response journals.  Next week, we will read more stories and focus on the elements of a story.  During our word study, we took a cut apart sentence and put the words back in order.  We used sentences we created as a class such as, "We read books in kindergarten," and "We sing songs in kindergarten."  The students glued the words in the correct order in their reading response journals after we went over the sentences as a class several times.  We also read a poem about the alphabet and noticed various letters, as well as rhyming words.  In writing, we continued our stories and some students finished and are illustrating their stories.  Everyone is almost done with their stories and some have started new stories.  Our class also continued work in our handwriting book and worked on the forming the letters X, Y, Z and C.  

In science, we finished our unit, Properties of Objects.  We started the week using the iPads and the Nearpod app.  We enjoyed learning how Nearpod works and look forward to using it more this year!  For the rest of the week we used our sense of smell to identify different scents, we used our sense of touch to determine texture of objects, we compared big and small items, compared the weight of different types of balls, and graphed a collection of shapes and colored items.  This was a lot of fun and we learned that scientists can record their information in a variety of ways.  We enjoyed discussing what we thought the different smells were the most (coffee, garlic, onion, pickles, and vanilla.)  We then finished our unit with an assessment.  Next week, we will begin another fun unit called Heat Causes Change.  On Friday we will have a day dedicated to apples!  We will be making applesauce to observe the changes in the apples through heating.  We also have apple themed activities planned throughout the rest of the day!

The Monkeys were very excited this past week to celebrate another superstar student of the week, CJ.  We were able to learn all about CJ's life and interests.

Next week, we do not have a superstar student.  Our next superstar will be announced this Friday afternoon.

Reminders

Please send in as many Box Tops as you can.  We are way behind other classes and grade levels this year in the competition.  September 28th is the last day of the competition at our school.  Even if our class does not win a prize, this Box Tops competition raises money for our PTA and it all goes back into our school and helping the students. Thank you!

Please be sure to check out the "Dates to Remember" below. 

Upcoming Dates to Remember: 

Sept. 24     Flu Clinic (for those students who were signed up by parents)
Sept. 25     Family PE/Wellness Night, 6-7 p.m.
Sept. 27     Coffee Chat for parents, Library, 7:45-8:15 a.m.
Oct. 8        Student Holiday/Parent~Teacher Fall Conferences
Oct. 9        Student Holiday
Oct. 12      PTA Movie Night, 5:30-7:30 p.m.

Superstars & Birthdays:

Morris Superstar:

None

Morris September Birthdays:

Mozelle-9/14
Ethan-9/26

News for the Week of September 10th

Thank you so much for attending the Kindergarten Open House Night last Tuesday.  I hope you heard some useful information.  Please know that you can always email me if you have any questions .  Thank you for signing up for fall conferences!  I look forward to meeting with all of you soon.  If you were not able to sign up for a conference on October 8th, I will be sending you an email soon to set up a different time.

In math this week, we continued our unit, Developing a Sense of Quantities to 10.  We will be finishing this unit this upcoming week.  We really started to get into a groove with our guided math stations.  We now have a timer set up on the screen in the classroom and it alerts students when to start a station, when to stop and clean up and when to rotate to the next station.  We are now doing 5 stations a day.  Math journals, independent practice, iPads, math game/activity, guided math with the teacher.  

Next week, we will finish our current math unit and begin the next unit, Introducing Sorting and Classifying, which includes 2D and 3D shapes

We read the poem, What Color?, and focused on the sight word, "is."  We wrote the word "is" several times and looked for rhyming words in our poem.  We read the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? again.  We then took the pictures of the characters we colored the previous week and glued them down in order so we could retell the story.  We also read The Napping House by Audrey Wood and then colored pictures of the characters in the story.  The students then cut out the pictures and glued them on top of the picture of the bed from the story in the correct order.  Now the students can retell this story, too.  We worked on retelling a main event from a story by reading the book, Swimmy by Leo Lionni.  We discussed various events from the story and concluded that the main event was when the school of little red fish arranged themselves in the shape of one huge fish with Swimmy as the eye.  Next week, we will begin a new unit, What Makes a Story?  In this unit next week, we will focus on learning about the meaning of characters and setting.  During our word study, we traced our names in crayon and glue and then decorated them with glitter!  We then used our names to begin learning that sentences are made of words with spaces in between them.  We started each sentence with our name.  For instance, "Kim likes to read books."  We discussed how the period at the end of each sentence was the stop sign.  In writing, we began writing some stories and using letter sounds we know to write words for our pictures.  We will continue working on these stories next week.  Our class also continued work in our handwriting book and worked on the forming the letters K, L, U, V and W.  

In social studies, we focused on authority figures that help us in our school.  We read about custodian and a school nurse.  Next week, we will learn about the constitution on Monday, as September 17th is Constitution Day.  We will then begin a unit called, People in History.

In science, we continued our unit, Properties of Objects.  We made a chart that listed many possible properties of objects.  We listed colors, shapes, sizes, textures and weight.  We then observed a button and recorded our observations in our science notebooks.  The students drew and colored what their button looked like and wrote property words to describe the button.  They also observed a variety of objects with a group and then chose one object.  They also drew this object in their science notebook and listed properties of their object.  We will finish our unit on Properties of Objects next week.

The Monkeys were very excited this past week to celebrate our first superstar student of the week, Jackson.  We were able to learn all about Jackson's life and interests.

Next week, we will get to learn all about our next superstar student, CJ!

Reminders

Please send in as many Box Tops and Box Tops certificates from HEB as you can this week.  The Box Tops promotion for certificates ends at HEB on Sept. 19th.  We are way behind other classes and grade levels this year in the competition.  September 28th is the last day of the competition at our school.  Thank you!

Please be sure to check out the "Dates to Remember" below. 

Upcoming Dates to Remember: 

Sept. 19     Bush's Chicken Spirit Night, 4-7 p.m.

Sept. 20     Picture Day
Sept. 25     Family PE/Wellness Night, 6-7 p.m.
Sept. 27     Coffee Chat for parents, Library, 7:45-8:15 a.m.

Superstars & Birthdays:

Morris Superstar:

CJ!

Morris September Birthdays:

Mozelle-9/14
Ethan-9/26

Happy Birthday Mozelle!

News for the Week of September 3rd

We hope you all enjoyed the Labor Day weekend!  I enjoyed catching up on some much needed sleep and spending time with my family.  It was nice to get back in the groove though this week, with a shorter 4 day week.

In math this week, we worked on our new unit, Developing a Sense of Quantities to 10.  We are working hard to learn our routine for our math stations.  We have a math journal station, an independent practice station and we will be adding a math technology station this upcoming week.  We will eventually add a game/hands-on activity station and a guided math station with the teacher.  We are continuing to look at numbers in a variety of different ways.

In language arts, we continued our word study by looking at our names and playing "name bingo".  The students had a lot of fun with this game since it used everyone's name in our class.

We read the poem, Colors, and focused on the sight word, "a."  We wrote the word "a" several times and looked for rhyming words in our poem.  We read the book That is NOT a Good Idea, by Mo Willems, and worked on making predictions.  The students learned that a prediction is a guess based on the title, pictures and words in a text.  It is okay if we make a prediction that is wrong.  We also make predictions before and during reading the book Suddenly!, by Colin McNaughton.  We also worked on retelling a story after reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?  The students have colored pictures of the characters in the book and will use the pictures to retell the story to a partner next week.  We will work on identifying the main event in a story, also.  In writing, we focused on figuring out if words we want to add to our stories are short or long (will it have many letters in the word or only a few?) and then we discussed how to "talk like a turtle" and say the words slowly.  As we slowly say words we listen for the sounds we hear and write them down.  We got our writing folders this week and worked on slowly saying words and writing the sounds we heard.

We continued work in our handwriting book and worked on the forming the letters N, M and H.  In social studies, we focused on authority figures that help us in our school.  We read about a librarian, principal and a teacher.  We will hear about a custodian and a school nurse next week.  We will also begin to learn about people in our community that help us.

In science, we began our unit, Properties of Objects.  We learned about our five senses and how they help to keep us aware.  We noticed the properties of popcorn with our senses, as we popped some in an air popper and ate some.  We noticed that the popcorn was white, soft, bumpy, salty and smelled yummy!  We read the book Seven Blind Mice and it showed us how some blind mice used their other senses to figure out what an object was by exploring its properties.  We will play a game with some buttons next week and describe the properties of the buttons.  We will make a chart of all of the different properties we might be able to use to describe a variety of objects.

Reminders

Please come to our Kindergarten Open House on Tuesday, Sept. 11th from 6:00-6:30 p.m.  We ask that only parents attend this if possible, and not students and/or siblings.  We will give an overview of kindergarten and answer any questions.  There will also be a sign-up sheet available to sign up for a fall parent/teacher conferences at the open house.  The conferences will be held on Monday, October 8th throughout the day. The PTA meeting will begin promptly at 6:30 p.m. in the cafeteria.

Please be sure to check out the "Dates to Remember" below. 

Upcoming Dates to Remember: 

Sept. 11     Kindergarten Open House, 6:00-6:30 p.m.

Sept. 11     PTA General Meeting, 6:30 p.m.
Sept. 14     Kona Ice, after school
Sept. 19     Bush's Chicken Spirit Night, 4-7 p.m.
Sept. 20     Picture Day
Sept. 20     Coffee Chat for parents, Library, 7:45-8:15 a.m.
Sept. 25     Family PE/Wellness Night, 6-7 p.m.

Superstars & Birthdays:

Morris Superstar:

Jackson!

Morris September Birthdays:

Mozelle-9/14
Ethan-9/26

News for the Week of August 27th

We are settling in to our kindergarten routine more and more as each day passes!  After our first 12 days of school, the students are ready for a nice, long 3 day weekend!

In math this week, we continued working on our unit, Introducing Number Concepts to 5.  We will continue this next week and go into our next unit, Developing a Sense of Quantities to 10.  The students are looking at numbers in many different ways such as, five frames, tally marks, domino and dot arrangements, the actual numeral, various amounts of objects and number lines.  We learned a couple of fun concentration/memory card games this past week.  We also began working in our math journals.  The students matched up the appropriate amount of objects to the correct number.  

In language arts, we continued our word study by putting together name puzzles that we will keep in our book boxes, we made a chart about how many letters are in our names, and we matched up pictures that rhymed such as dog/log, mouse/house, etc.  We read the poem, In My Book, and focused on the sight word, "the."  We wrote the word "the" several times and looked for rhyming words in our poem.  We read the book A My Name is Alice and created a picture of ourselves and added the words, "__ my name is _______, and I like ______."  This was fun!  We created sentences such as, "K my name is Kim, and I like kites."  Be sure to check them out in our hallway!  We read the book Chrysanthemum again this week and we discussed how many letters are in our names.  We then created a class chart of how many letters are in our names.  We will begin learning about predictions next week and work on retelling evens in a story.  In writing, we reviewed expectations for writing workshop time and shared our stories about things we like.  We worked on talking about our pictures as if we were telling a story.  Next week, we will focus on talking slow like a turtle when saying the words for our story.  This will help us hear the letter sounds in our words.  We continued work in our handwriting book this week, too. We are learning to start forming our letters and writing them from the top.  We worked on D, E, P, R and B.  

In social studies, we are continuing to focus on why we have rules at home, at school and in the community.  We will start learning about authority figures in our school that help us this next week.

In science, we continued working on a unit called "I Am a Scientist."  We discussed the difference between "tools" we use in science and "toys."  We sorted pictures in our science notebook under the categories, "Tools" and "Toys."  We read and signed our Science Safety Contract and glued it into our science notebook.  We also had fun making play dough in science this week and focused on using safe practices while working with materials.  The Monkeys were then able to explore the play dough we made.  We will finish talking about how scientists ask questions, observe and measure things next week and will then begin a new unit called, "Properties of Objects."

Reminders

Book orders are due on Tuesday, September 4th if you would like to purchase books for your child.  Please send the book order and check or money order made payable to Scholastic Reading Clubs in your child's folder or order and purchase online.

If you have not filled out and returned the permission form from our counselor, Mrs. Hougham, please do so as soon as possible.  This form will allow your child to work in social skills groups with our counselor and Westwood PROS (high school students who mentor).  The students LOVE having this opportunity.  

Please be sure to check out the "Dates to Remember" below. 

Upcoming Dates to Remember: 

Sept. 3      Holiday, No School

Sept. 6      WatchDOGS Kick-Off,

                 Cafeteria, 6 p.m.

Sept. 11     Kindergarten Open House, 6:00-6:30 p.m.

Sept. 11     PTA General Meeting, 6:30 p.m.
Sept. 14     Kona Ice, after school
Sept. 19     Bush's Chicken Spirit Night, 4-7 p.m.
Sept. 20     Coffee Chat for parents, Library, 7:45-8:15 a.m.
Sept. 25     Family PE/Wellness Night, 6-7 p.m.

Superstars & Birthdays:

Morris Superstar:

None

Morris September Birthdays:

Mozelle-9/14
Ethan-9/26

Happy Birthday Leighton!