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!