Laundry Basket Race!

Important Dates!
Wednesday, May 29th:  We will be walking to the Frog Pond by the Shelburne Athletic Club.  Please make sure your child has boots for that day and is dressed for the weather.

 Friday, May 31st: We have the PTO Jog-a-thon.  This is a very fun and exciting day for us at SCS!  We will be running around the bus circle from 9:00-9:30 that morning and then will eat lunch out on the playground at 10:45am. We will spend some time outdoors enjoying all the activities and the music from the DJ!  Please make sure your child wears sneakers that day and that your child brings a water bottle.

Friday, June 14th:  The last day of school is a half day.  Children will be dismissed at 11:30am.
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We had another wonderful week of Kindergarten!  We have been working on our Alphabet Countdown Memory books and cannot believe that we are already on letter N on Monday.  It has been nice reflecting about the wonderful activities we have done this year and all the memories we have made!

Your child may have mentioned to you that we have been reading Charlotte's Web during Quiet Time. Each day after lunch, we all meet at the carpet and the children rest while I read aloud to them.  We finally finished the book on Monday and as a celebration for filling our Cat Coin jar, we are watching the movie!  Be sure to ask your child who his or her favorite character was in the book and the movie!

During theme, we continued learning about forces and motion and push and pull.  This week we added the idea of friction to our discussions.  We put our forces to work by participating in the Great Laundry Basket Race!  I filled a laundry basket with books from the library and a cute bear stuffie!  The children then each took turns pushing it from one end of the classroom to the other as I timed them.  Prior to pushing, they all made estimates about how long it would take and then afterward we compared our estimates with our actual times.  We also did the race again, but this time the children had to pull the basket.  Which was more difficult?  Which needed more force?  Ask your child to tell you about our laundry basket race! 

At writer's workshop, we are continuing to write poems.  Many children are writing concrete poems, that we learned about last week.  These are poems in the shape of the subject of the poem.  This week, many were writing lantern poems.  Lantern poems are five lines with one word on the first line, two words on the second line, three words on the third line, four words on the fourth line, and one word on the last line.  I am very impressed with their poems...creative!  Next week, they will each choose two poems to publish in  our Kindergarten poetry anthology.  Be on the lookout for this anthology!

Lastly, in math we started the week by making paper frogs and counting the eyes.  We were practicing counting my 2s and looking for number patterns as we count by twos.  Then we practiced more with estimating and measuring with a unifix cube measuring activity. The children worked on precisely measuring objects in the room with unifix cubes.  Finally, they learned two new card games:  Make Ten and More Than 1/Less Than 1.  One game worked on building our fluency with make ten math facts and the other worked on the idea of subtracting and adding ones.  We continue to be very busy mathematicians!

Have a great weekend!