Upcoming Events!

Hope to see some of you at the PTO Holiday Craft Fair on Saturday, December 8th.  It is from 9:30-1:30pm.  Also, we are going to the Flynn Theatre on Tuesday, December 11th to see Pete the Cat: The Musical.  This is a morning field trip.  We will leave around 8:45am and be back to school by lunch.  We are looking forward to seeing Pete the Cat on stage!

This week during theme we have been enjoying learning about each other's holiday traditions! It is fun to see all the similarities we have around the holidays.  On your child's sharing day, he or she has talked about the tradition and shared a photo (if there was one) and then we all illustrated a picture to go with the tradition.  At the end of our Traditions unit, each child will bring home an illustrated book with all of our class' traditions.  This week we learned about Carter's cookies, Penelope's "Bear House", Leif's Christmas tree star, and Grayson's Grandma's pumpkin bread!  Next week, five more friends will share!



We had a new Scholastic Let's Find Out magazine to read this week.  It was about bears getting ready for winter and hibernating.  We used our "pointer power" to help us read the magazine and we learned a new sight word: "it". Also during our literacy time, we were introduced to two more letters: h and k.  We practiced forming the letters and brainstormed words that have that letter at its initial sound. We are almost to the end of the alphabet!  When we come back to school in January, we will quickly go through how to form all the uppercase letters as well.

In Writer's Workshop, we talked about what to do when you want to spell a big word and do not know how!  In Kindergarten, we call it "best guess" spelling.  This means the children are listening for the sounds they hear in a word and writing down the letters that make those sounds. Today we talked about following these steps to figure out how to write a word in a story:

• First, think of what you want to say
• Say the word slowly
• Listen to the sounds in the word
• Think about what letters make those sounds
• Write the letters for the sounds you hear

  

I was amazed today, during Writer's Workshop, to see these Kindergartners spelling larger words and writing sentences!  They should be proud! If your children ask you how to spell a word at home, instead of telling them, encourage them to use the steps I outlined above.  You will be impressed!

We also had some fun reading a few versions of The Gingerbread Man. We read The Gingerbread Baby, The Gingerbread Man Loose at School, and The Ninjabread Man.  Which version was your child's favorite?  We also did a little gingerbread math by creating a gingerbread glyph.  A glyph is a pictorial way to collect data.  I had five questions about cookies for the children and they got to decorate a paper gingerbread person based on the answers to those questions.  For example, if I asked how many cookies they like to eat at school (from 0-5), they put that many buttons on their gingerbread man.  After everyone finished, we used the gingerbread to do some sorting and gather information about our class!

In Math, we continue to study numbers from 1-20, with activities the include matching numerals and quantities, counting forward and backward, reading numerals, comparing quantities to determine more or less, and adding.  We were introduced to new game called Bicycle Race that helped us to practice doubling numbers

Have a wonderful weekend!