30 Days of Kindergarten!

Each day, as a part of Number Corner, we determine how many days we have been in school.  On Friday, we hit day 30!  It's hard to believe that much time has already passed.  It has been so wonderful to meet with all of you last week to discuss your child's growth and learning over these thirty days!  Although we do not have another formal conference until March, please feel free to contact me with any concerns or questions, or if you just want to stop by our room one day to see what is happening in Kindergarten!

We began our first Social Studies theme this week!  For the next month, we will be learning about our community and identifying the many communities to which we all belong.  We were introduced to the concept of community by reading On the Town: a story about a boy who explores his town with his mom.  We learned that a community is a group of people who live, work, or play together.  We brainstormed a list of people, places, and things in our community of Shelburne and then each child made a pocket flap book with a picture of themselves and four places in our community.  Which places did your child draw?  We also read a book called Windows which tells the story of a young boy who goes out for a walk at night and looks at what is going on at the houses in his neighborhood community.  We talked about neighborhoods as a community and that family is also a community.  Each child then made a pop-up picture of his or her home!  If you swing by our room, be sure to check out how your child replicated your house!  We will be going on some community walks toward the end of October.  We hope to visit the Shelburne Supermarket, the bank, and the Flying Pig Bookstore.

In Fundations, we were introduced to two new sight words this week: "I" and "the".  These sight words were found in a new emergent reader book for us called Pumpkins.  In this book the phrase "I can see the..." is repeated and then the last bit of the text is changed on each page.  We began reading the book by going on a picture walk and talking about what we saw on every page.  Then we did some choral reading and finally, the children read independently.  Also in Fundations, we focused on the letters M and I.  We practiced the sounds for each letter and practiced letter formation.  Ask your child to tell you the keyword picture for each of these letters!


In math, we continued working with five frames and ten frames as a tool to count efficiently and  to see numbers in groups.  We also learned a new game called Count and Compare.  In this partner game, the children each turn over a ten-frame card filled with dots.  They have to decide which card has a greater number of dots and which have a lesser number of dots.  They put the cards on the game board and then spin a "greater than and less than spinner" to see who wins the cards.  Ask your child to tell you about this fun new game!

Lastly, we had our second Nearby Nature session of the year.  This month we learned about leaves!  We began by going out in to the school yard to collect different kinds of leaves in the beautiful, sunny warm fall weather!  When we brought the leaves back inside, we sorted them by color, shape, veins, lobes, etc.  The children also watched a puppet show and learned about what leaves need (water, sun, and soil) and why leaves change color in the fall.  Thanks to Jane and Kendra for a great leaf lesson!

Happy Weekend!