Weekly News Jan 30-Feb 3

Yikes!  How is it almost February already?!  February brings some exciting events in Kindergarten!  We will celebrate Valentine's Day and the 100th day of school.  We will exchange valentine cards with the class!  Here is a list of student names if you'd like to get started early!  I'll be sending a hard copy of this list home soon as well!   Be on the look out for 100 day information to come home soon too!

Here are links to the homework calendar and lunch menu for February!

Important Dates and Reminders:

February 7: 1/2 day 11:30 dismissal
February 14: Red, white and pink day and possibly 100th day of school celebration
(weather pending)
February 23: 1/2 day 11:30 dismissal
February 24: NO SCHOOL
February 27: Family Night (more info to come)

Here is a peek at our week!  We are wrapping up both reading and writing units and will have lots to celebrate!

Reading: This week we will wrap up our unit on Bigger Books, Bigger Reading Muscles by powering up our reread power to bring books to life and our book talk power to retell, share new information, and have powerful partner conversations.  We will also learn about how we can use sticky notes to jot our thinking down while reading.  We will celebrate all of our hard work in this unit as we wrap it up on Friday with a little graduation into new and trickier books

Writing:  This week we will move into our last week of writing procedural (how to) books.  We will add introductions and conclusions to our books.  We will also be working to make sure our books have all they need to teach readers and will choose a specific audience to gift one of or more of our books to.  We will also be choosing one of our best pieces to publish and will work together as a class to finish writing our How to Make Peanut Butter and Jelly book.  We will be using this book at the end of the week and will put our writing to the test as we REALLY follow the steps to make sandwiches for snack as a celebration!

Math:  This week we will continue to extend our understanding of teen numbers, sorting and story problems.  We will be introduced to new tools called centimeter cubes and ten sticks that will provide us with another way to show and see a group of ten in teen numbers.  We will also focus on finding partners of a given number by playing a game with a partner.  Our math centers this week will be:

• playing teen number and equation memory
• playing chip toss to see partners of a number
• playing a dice game to quickly see quantities and add them together
• following directions to build a teen number using unifix cubes and comparing what we have built

Social Studies: We will finish family centers and will revisit the definition of family through revising pictures we have previously drawn and labeled.  We will also be having some class discussion surrounding The Family Book that we have been using throughout this unit.

Word Work: We will learn new words this week: with, new, away, down, do
Looking to break up some winter boredom?  Play Sight Word Hide and Seek!  Have your child write their sight words on individual pieces of paper.  Then a parent or sibling can hide them around your home and your child can hunt for them!