Weekly News May 1-5

Happy May!  Did I just say that?!  I cannot believe we are entering that last full month of school!  We are sure in for lots of fun and excitement as we do all we can to get ready to become 1st graders next year!!

Just a reminder all Fang reading slips need to be turned in ASAP,  Tickets for the game will be ordered this week.

Upcoming Dates and Reminders:

May 4: Action Figures/Sci Fi Day
May 22: Family Night
May 26: No School

Reading: We took a step back this week and focused on some strong partnership skills to make sure we are not only reading to our partner but talking about our books and asking for help to solve tricky words.   This week we will jump into rereading.  Readers will learn that we reread to fix up tricky parts, make their voices sound more smooth, study characters and to even jot their thoughts about what they are reading. 

Writing:  Writing bootcamp was a success!  Each day students felt empowered to do all they could to make their writing easy to read and to make sure they were writing enough!  They also thought it was pretty funny to salute me and call me ma'am after I  gave a direction or writing tip!  This week we will begin our last unit on true story writing.  We will review the planning process for story writing be sure to tell our story first as we touch the pages of our book and then to draw and write.  We will also make the connection between our reading and writing and ask ourselves if our writing "sounds right" when we first tell the story and again when we reread it.

Math: by the end of  the year, Kindergarten students need to be fluent in solving addition and subtraction problems up to 5.  Ideally this means that are able to solve these problems without using tools, fingers or drawings.  This week we will work to ensure fluency by using and sorting flashcards and playing addition and subtraction games.   Here is a picture of an Addition Cross Out game board.  We will simply roll 2 dice and then cross out the sum.  This would be a great way to practice facts at home too!

Science: The boys and girls are SO excited about the work we are doing in science.  This week we learned the vocab words: force, gravity, compare and contrast and are working to use them as we conduct our explorations and experiments.  We will continue to compare balls this week and experiment with their bounciness by testing how various balls bounce on different surfaces and how many times they bounce.  We will also use straws to test how easy it is to move different types of balls using our own wind.
Check out these partners working hard together!

Word Work: Here is a link with helpful information about sight words. It also contains a list of 100 frequently encountered sight words. If you feel like your child has a firm grasp on our sight word list, use words from this list! Many of these words will be focused on in 1st grade.  Our goal is to make sure students are able to not only read, but write the sight words we have learned with automaticity. 

Weekly News April 24-28

Hello and welcome to a beautiful week!  It will be nice to have a full 5 days to learn and have fun with the boys and girls!

Important Dates and Reminders:
April 28: Funky Friday (dress as silly as you want)

A note from PSC:

Teacher Appreciation Week - May 1-5

Help thank our teachers for their hard work. Provide an item for lunch or snacks during Teacher Appreciation Week.  Click on this link to sign up.  Thank you for your support!

Here is a peek at our week:

Reading: This week we will continue to focus on cross checking what we read by asking: "what sounds right, looks right and makes sense."  We will learn that readers are flexible and try out many different strategies when trying to answer these questions.  We will also learn about the importance and reasons for rereading.  The big reasons we want students to reread is to make sure they are understanding what is read and to make sure their reading sounds smooth and fluent (not like a robot :)).  In the classroom we are now working on "scooping up" words in sentences and phrases rather than reading word by word.  Students may likely still read in a choppy way when decoding new words, but we can encourage them to go back and make it sound smooth.

Writing: We have now wrapped up our persuasive writing unit, which was the third and final genre of writing we will focus on this year.  We will end the year writing true stories, but before that we will have some fun with a "Writing Bootcamp."  This week students will learn that two of the things writers ALWAYS do (and make a habit of) are writing in a way others can read and write as much as they can.  Each day we will practice ways to make both of these things happen for us in a more automatic way!  We will work to hold one another accountable for doing our best work and we even set goals for ourselves by joining a "platoon" with one of these goals in mind! I am hopeful this will bring some of the important things we have learned about writing together in a fun and motivating way they will revive and strengthen our writing from now until the end of the school year!

Math: Our focus in math this week will again be on partners of number form 6-10 and reviewing partners of 5.  we will be playing a game called "Pigs in a Pen"  to help us become more automatic in recognizing partners of 10.  To play this game you need ten small objects.  One partner closes his/her eyes and the other partners takes some of the objects away and then says "Oink, oink pigs in a pen.  Tell me what is the partner of 10."   The students need to figure out how many objects are still there and then how many are missing to make a total of 10.  This can really be played with any number and is a quick and easy way to practice math at home.  We will also be working on recognizing the value of teen numbers and how they increase as they grow and we will create and compare values 1-20 to look for patterns.

Science: This week we will be doing some hands on exploration of different types of balls and how they react to human force when we bounce, push and roll them.  We will review the scientific method before conducting these movement experiments and will capture our observations through words and pictures in our science notebooks.  The boys and girls are very excited about this!

Word Work: Our focus on readable writing will flow into our word work time this week.  If you child is writing at home encourage them to make their writing readable by writing neat letters on the lines of paper and making sure the letters they are making are Add to distinguishable as upper case or lower case. 

Weekly News April 18-21

I hope you have all been enjoying this beautiful spring weather!  I know it meant lots of time for yard work and wagon rides over here!  I was reflecting over break about how little time I have left with the boys and girls and am excited to get back into the school groove and make the most of it!!

Important Dates and Reminders:

April 20: Social Studies and Subs Family Night
April 21: Wear Blue and Green for Earth Day
                Earth Day Clean up from 2:15-2:45
April 28: Funky Friday (dress as silly as you want)

A note from PSC:

Teacher Appreciation Week - May 1-5

Help thank our teachers for their hard work. Provide an item for lunch or snacks during Teacher Appreciation Week.  Click on this link to sign up.  Thank you for your support!

Here is a peek at our week:

Reading:  This week in reading we will be doing some important work of really thinking about the steps we take and places we check when solving an unknown word.  We will take a deeper look at the questions "Does it make sense?"  Does it sound right?" and "Does it look right?"  We will learn the clues we use to answer all of these questions and to even assess ourselves on which clues (picture, book/story topic or letter sounds) we use most often and which we need to rely on more.  We really want readers to be able to rely on these clues equally as they develop as readers so they have a balanced and effective approach to word solving.

Writing: This is the perfect week for us to wrap up our persuasive writing unit as Earth Day is almost here.  We will work to edit and publish a few pieces of our work on environmental issues and will be presenting them to our second grade buddies at the end of the week.  We will focus on speaking about the topics we wrote about in a persuasive way by standing tall, using a loud voice and using body gestures to really get to really get our listeners engaged.  Here is a link to a video we watched of a boy who is doing these things.  Although he is not speaking on the topics we are; the boys and girls were able to see how he used his voices and words to communicate well with others!

Math:  We are just beginning our LAST math unit of the year...holy cow!!  This unit is called Consolidation of Concepts and will focus on all of the important skills students need to attain in Kindergarten in order to have a solid grasp of mathematical concepts to build on in 1st grade.  All of these topics are repetitive and you might find me to a be a broken record when keeping you in the loop!  Please know that this is by design...our curriculum Math Expressions, is a spiral curriculum, meaning concepts are taught over and over across the year in various ways, taking students' development into consideration and giving them ample opportunity to master and deeply understand concepts! 

Science:  This week we will begin one of our most beloved science units called Balls and Ramps.  This week we will build some background knowledge and vocabulary about how and why balls move and bounce the way they do.

Word Work: Please continue to reinforce sight word automaticity in both reading and writing.  One way to practice writing is to say short sentences with multiple sight words in them and have your child write them.  When they finish have them check that their words are spelled correctly and fix up the ones that are not.  Also, challenge them to write them with all lower case letters. 

Our FUN Friday

Friday was THE best day!  We did our absolute best at the Knowledge-a-thon,  celebrated our reading with a poetry extravaganza, ate lunch in our classroom and saw a fabulous performance at the PAC!

Check out some photos of our poetry centers!

We used watercolor to illustrate poems, wrote our own copy cat poems and practiced reading and performing poems.

Some us took the stage and performed a poem we had written or practiced reading over and over!

Weekly News April 3-7

Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me this past week at conferences.  I enjoy time spent filling you in on the wonderful things your children are doing.

We are heading into a fun and exciting week preparing for our knowledge-a-thon!  There will be dress up days each day this week to help us grow our excitement for this big event!  We have practiced questions in the classroom and the kids are rockin' them!  Please keep up the practice at  home too!

Here are the April lunch menu and school newsletter. 
Please stay tuned for an updated homework calendar!

Important Dates and Reminders:
April 3: Brewers or Sports Day
April 4: Dress as a KAT question or answer
April 5: Pajama Day
April 6: Super Hero Day
April 7: Knowledge-a-thon in the the AM
             PAC field  trip in the PM- Dress Fancy Day
April 11: Egg Crack Off and Class Color Day
April 12-17: NO SCHOOL
April 21: Wear Green and Blue for Earth Day
April 20: Social Studies and Subs Family Night
April 28: Funky Friday (dress as silly as you want)

Here is a peek into our learning for the next week:

Reading: This week we will become avid readers of poetry.  We will work to add expression and feeling to the poems we read and will use the rhythm of poems to help us read smoothly.  Reading familiar and new poems will be a great way for us to work on sight words, word ending and so much more!  We will also be writing copycat poems using familiar rhythms and beats.  We will share and perform these poems on reading playdates.

Writing:  Our persuasive writing unit has turned a corner!  We have all rallied around a common cause "Keeping the Earth Clean" and will use all we have learned as persuasive writers so far to create books, songs. letters and signs to persuade others to do their part to keep our planet clean.  This is the perfect time to do this work as Earth Day is approaching.

Math:  This week we will review (one last time) using pictures to show partners of a number, classifying 3D shapes and solving teen number equations before taking our test on Thursday.

Social Studies: This week we will finish up our All About Me centers and will learn about a new technology tool called See Saw that we will use to share what we have learned about ourselves during this unit.  Stay tuned for more information on how you will be able to utilize See Saw at home!

Word Work:  We are continuing to work hard to transfer the work we are doing with sight words into our writing.  We have also been working hard on identifying short and long vowel sounds and then using them correctly in our writing.