Upcoming Events:
- Tuesday, October 20: 8am Mass; doors open 5 min. early at 7:45!
- Next week: hearing/vision screenings will take place next week.
Looking Ahead:
- Friday, October 30 is our Halloween party and the school-wide trunk or treat! The party will begin at 10am and the trunk or treat begins at 1:45. A reminder of what you signed up for: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090A4FA8AB23A0FF2-66403208-tricks#/
And here is the note I sent home as a hard copy in your child’s folder: Halloween Guidelines for Kindergarten
This Week:
The house book is complete and is starting to travel through our class! Ask your child which lucky friend got to take the book home this week.
We learned so many new songs and circle time games for the month of October. Here are a few–see if your child can finish them! We have a few more songs and poems to learn next week.
Pumpkin patch, pumpkin patch, come along with me to the pumpkin patch……
Pass the pumpkin all around, listen to the spooky sound……..
Way up high in the apple tree, two little apples smile down at me….
What’s due:
- Name Writing/number pages: turn in at any time for a sticker!
- Milk orders: click HERE
- Hot lunch orders: (1st lunch for kinder) click HERE
- Spirit Wear: Click HERE
Next Week:
Next week will be all about PUMPKINS! We picked out a pumpkin at the market this week and will use a graph to determine what face we should carve on it. The woman from the farmer’s market that did our fruits and veggies talk told us a story about the pumpkins her farmer sells. She said he goes around and picks up EVERY pumpkin on his farm so it’s sitting upright in order to get round pumpkins and not ones that are misshapen. Boy, that’s a lot of work, but we sure do appreciate our perfectly round pumpkin! 🙂
We will learn the finger play poem “5 Little pumpkins” next week.
Language Arts:
Next week we start one of my favorite read aloud weeks! We’ll be reading and comparing stories with a graphic organizer, we’ll be sequencing the events of stories, and will also focus on the story elements–characters, setting, problem and solution. The first set of books that we will be reading and comparing are: Little Red Hen, Little Red Hen Makes Pizza and Little Green Witch. They’re great books to use for text to text comparisons. In addition to these, we’ll be reading Room on the Broom and Big Pumpkin and will work on sequencing the events in this story and naming the different story elements. They’re such fun read alouds for the kids AND it’s a great way to really start to dive in to story comprehension.
- Here are the Fundations letter/keyword/sounds we have learned so far in unit 1.
t/top/t
b/bat/b
f/fun/f
n/nut/n
m/man/m
i/itch/i
u/up/u
c/cat/c
o/octopus/o
a/apple/a
g/game/g,
d/dog/d,
s/snake/s
e/Ed/e
r/rat/r
We did not get to our letter this week, so we’ll get to that next week!
Next week: p/pan/p
Here is a video of what the letter/key/sound drill practice sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYhKyXCs7Ug
- Journaling: We will continue to practice journaling focusing on the following skills: writing words with pencil, drawing detailed pictures with crayons and using lowercase letters only. Next week, we will begin to not just label pictures with a word, but will work on writing them in sentence format: “I see the dog,” “I see the apple,” etc. We will use “finger spaces” in between our words and will use a “stop sign” (punctuation) to show our thought is complete and the sentence is done.
- Shared writing: We will continue shared writing. Each child will be called up to the front and will have a chance to help me write a short “story” following this format: My name is–, I am — years old, I like —, I do not like —-. We’ve almost made our way through the whole class!
- Fundations printing: We will keep practicing letter formation using the sky, plane, grass and worm lines.
- Word wall words: Current word wall words: no, yes, the, I, go, we, will, see, is, to. Next week I will introduce A, MY. We will practice both reading and writing these words. See if your child can show you some of these when you’re reading at home!
Math:
We are well into our second math workbook which is all about representing numbers 6-10 with objects, representing 6-10 with a written numeral and comparing numbers to 10. In addition to this, we will continue to work on the following math skills all month long:
- Number writing: Writing numbers correctly using the Fundations lines. Remember, backwards numbers will still happen and are completely developmentally appropriate.
- Tally Marks: We will use tally marks to represent numbers and show “tens” and “ones.”
- Base Ten blocks: We are now using base 10 blocks to represent numbers greater than 10.
- Ten Frames: We will use a double ten frame to represent teen numbers and show “tens” and “ones.”
- Counting: We will continue to practice counting by 1s, now up to 50! Keep practicing at home. We like to pat our laps as we count and CLAP each time we get to a new group of ten.
- Graphing: We will create and interpret graphs; we have now created and interpreted both bar and tally graphs. Next weeks our graphs will be all about PUMPKINS! We will focus on questions like, “which had the most?” and higher level thinking questions like, “how many more did ___ have compared to ___?”
- Greater than/less than/equal to: We will use the following symbols to compare numbers: >, <, =
Religion/Science:
- We will continue to attend 8am Mass on Tuesdays.
- Next week will continue our unit on FEELINGS. God cares how we feel–when we are happy, sad, angry. He always cares and asks US to care about how others are feeling too! We will continue our SECOND STEP program which gives the kids an opportunity to name feelings that they’re seeing on other kids in a picture card. We will also review our calming strategies and the words we can use when feeling different emotions. This is not something we cover in just a few weeks. This is something we discuss all year long and is a big part of kindergarten!