Nearby Nature

We reached the 20th day of school this week!  The time is already going by so quickly! I am looking forward to meeting with you during the month of October for Parent Conferences.  I sent an email with a link to sign up this week.  Please contact me if you have any questions or need help signing up. Also, please check your child's Friday Folder this week as there are several important notes regarding our field trip on Monday and our Kindergarten Open House on Thursday!

We had our first Nearby Nature lesson of the year!  Nearby Nature is a parent-led science lesson brought to us each month related to themes in nature.  This month's topic was Leaf-Eaters!  At the end of summer, many leaves show signs of plant-eaters both big and small.  We had the opportunity to look at different "leaf-eating" styles: holes, scalloped edges, or even rolled edges.  Can your child find any of these signs of leaf eaters in your yard? We also talked about habitats and food chains, learning about how the flow of energy goes from the sun to a plant to an herbivore to a carnivore.  We also watched a fun puppet show about food chains!  Be sure to ask your child about Nearby Nature!  Thanks to Jackson and Christine for volunteering to be our Nearby Nature parents for the year!

Each week we seem to begin something new in Kindergarten.  This week it happened to be Fundations which is our spelling, phonics, and handwriting program.  For the next few weeks, your child will be introduce to lowercase letters in the alphabet.  We will review the sound the letter makes, read stories that highlight the letter and sound, and practice handwriting.  Each letter also has a keyword card to help us remember the sound.  We learned the letters T and B this week.  The T keyword is a top and the B keyword is a bat.  See if your child can tell you the sounds of those letters and write the lowercase letters!

We finished our All About Me unit this week as we wrapped up our Totally Terrific Child shares.  We all enjoyed learning about our classmates and finding similarities in interests and making connections.  It was also a great opportunity to practice learning everyone's names!  Can your child name most of the children in our class?  Speaking of names, we read a great book called Teach Me Your Name.  It is a true story about a child who had a name that was hard for everyone to pronounce...and 20 letters long.  This made her feel self-conscious about her name, her cultural background, and her name's meaning. This book provided a wonderful opportunity for a conversation about making everyone feel a part of a community and welcome, but also allowed me to share your child's name story with the class.  The children all enjoyed hearing how you chose their names!

In math, we continued our work with numeral formation. This week we practiced six and seven.  Can your child share the six and seven rhymes with you.  We also continued with Work Places that are reinforcing our numeral identification, 1:1 correspondence with counting, and numeral formation:  Beat You to Five and Go Fish.  Ask your child to tell you about Beat You to Five, a game with unifix cubes and spinner and, maybe, you could play Go Fish at home this weekend! Next week, we will do some work with patterns before moving on to our second unit.

Lastly, we celebrated the beginning of fall with a Scholastic Let's Find Out magazine.  This week's magazine was a small easy reader book about the signs of fall.  We talked about what we have noticed in nature to let us know fall has arrived and then we practiced reading the book together.  The book had repetitive wording and the children could use pictures clues to help read the words.  Each child has his or her mini-book in a book box and is looking forward to reading it to you at our Open House.  They were all so proud!!

Have a wonderful weekend!  Hard to believe October is right around the corner!

Fire Safety!

 This week we had a visit from the Shelburne Fire Department as a part of our Fire Prevention Day at SCS.  The Kindergarten Team met with two firefighters who explained what to do if there is ever a fire in the house. They reviewed the importance of families having a meeting place outside the house and identifying the difference between toys at home and tools that could cause a fire to start. The children then had the opportunity to crawl through the smoke house, staying low to the ground, and then had the chance to practice how to stop, drop, and roll.  be srue to ask your child about these special visitors.  What did your child learn about fire safety? We also had our first Evacuation Drill (fire drill). The children did a great job of exiting the building safely, quietly, and quickly! 










During Reader's Workshop, we worked on a combined literacy and art project.  This one was based on A My Name is Alice by Jane Bayer.  The children had to brainstorm something they like...or could like, that started with the same letter/letter sound as their first names.  That was tricky!  They then practiced writing their names and created a self-portrait out of construction paper.  Their art work is amazing!  We also took this opportunity to review/learn how to use scissors safely in our classroom.  This work is going up on our bulletin board outside our room. You get to see it during our Open House on October 3rd!

We continued with our Totally Terrific Child shares this week during Writer's Workshop.  The children are doing a great job of sharing information about themselves and those in the audience are really working on asking our Totally Terrific Child questions.  We have had a lot of discussions about the difference between a comment and a question....asking a question, instead of just sharing a comment is hard work for Kindergartners!  We will be wrapping up our Totally Terrific Child shares next week.

In math, we have continued our work with the five frames and finding combinations that add up to five.  We also were introduced to ten frames; shared strategies for counting dots on a ten frame; and practiced finger patterns for the numbers 6-10.  We also played a game called Spill Five Beans.  It not only helped us with 1:1 counting and combinations of five, but is also helped us to practice numeral formation.  Ask your child to explain this game to you!  This week we also practiced making the numbers four and five!  Can your child write the numbers 1-5 for you?



Be sure to ask your child about...

• Bean Bag Toss and Old Shoes, New Shoes greetings at Morning Meeting
• Learning how to stop, drop, and roll during Fire Safety
• Singing and dancing to Cat Party on Go Noodle
• Who shared for Totally Terrific Child this week and if they made any connections

One last note...be on the lookout for an email from me regarding Parent Conference sign ups.  Also, Library books are due back every Wednesday.  If your child forgets to bring his or her books that day, no worries!  Your child can go the next day and make a quick book exchange!
Have a great summer-like weekend!

Totally Terrific Child!

We have had a lot of fun learning about our Totally Terrific Children this week!  We have been investigating their names, looking at their pictures, and learning about their likes. Once each Totally Terrific Child shares his or her pictures, each child creates a page of the child's book.  This is also a great opportunity for us to work on beginning letter formation and handwriting as well as adding details to pictures.  Ask your child who the Totally Terrific Children were this week?

In math, we began numeral formation.  We began by learning the numeral formation rhymes for one, two and three and then we practiced writing them on whiteboards. We also drew them in the air with our skywriters!  I included the numeral formation rhymes in your child's Friday Folder this week.  There is no pressure to practice numeral formation at home, but if your child is interested, these rhymes might help him or her remember how they go.  Next week, we will move on to four and five! 

We also learned two new math games: Counting Leaves and Unifix Cube Trains.  In both games, the children were practicing 1:1 counting and subitizing (reading the dot patterns on the dice rapidly!).  Be sure to ask your child about these two games!  Can your child explain how to play?

We created another class book this week!  We read The Ok Book by Amy Rosenthal and learned that we do not have to be the best at everything.  It's ok to be just ok at something and that we are all learning and getting better at different things.  Each child wrote a page for our book sharing about an activity at which he or she is just ok!  What did your child choose?  We are excited to share this book with you at our October Open House!

This week we had our first Second Step lesson with Ms. O.  Second Step is a social-emotional curriculum in which children learn and practice strategies for listening, getting along with others, inviting friends to play, sharing, etc.  Each week Ms. O visits our classroom and teaches the lesson.  It usually begins with a visit from Puppy, Slow Down Snail, or Be Calm Bunny (puppets!).  This week's lesson was about the listening rules:  Eyes are watching; ears are listening; voices off; bodies still.  We are really practicing our listening rules!!  Included in your child's Friday Folder is a letter about Second Step and this week's lesson if you would like to chat with your child about his or her learning.

 Have a great weekend!

Be sure to also ask about...

• Ms. Celmer visiting our room to read The Energy Bus
• Using whiteboards for numeral formation
• Our Willaby Wallaby and high five greetings at Morning Meeting
• Our listening rules that we learned from Ms. O during Second Step.

Super Second Week!!

We had another great week in Kindergarten!  Everyone is becoming more familiar with our routines and seems pretty comfortable in our room!

This week we read a story called This Year Will Be the Best and brainstormed what our hopes will be for this Kindergarten year.  Some children want to learn to read and make friends and others are just hoping to get ice cream or build snowmen!  Their beautiful illustrations are hanging out in hallway outside our room.  Be sure to check them out if you stop by!  We then took our hopes and dreams and talked about how we needed to act and behave in the classroom in order for everyone to achieve their hopes, to learn, and to grow.  We created a long list of ideas and then narrowed them down to being safe, responsible, and respectful.  You can see our classroom promises below that everyone signed!  Ask your child to tell you about our classroom promises!  We also read our first Let's Find Out magazine from Scholastic News.  This week was about classroom rules!  We read the magazine together and the children practiced reading the part: "We can do it!".  I have included the Let's Find Out Magazine in your child's Friday Folder.  Have fun reading it together at home!

We began our first unit in math this week as well.  This first unit focuses on the counting sequence to 20 and quantities of 10.  The children were also introduced to some Work Places. Work Places are mathematics centers that children visit each day that connect to our math unit.  This week the children investigated pattern blocks, unifix cubes, polydrons, and geoboards.  Ask your child which Work Place was a favorite!  After using the Work Places, we also focused on attributes and sorting.  We looked our shoes and sorted ourselves into groups based on attributes, such as color, laces, velcro, no shoelaces, etc.

Lastly, we started our "All About Us" unit with an introduction to Totally Terrific Child.  Each day for the next few weeks, children will be sharing their timelines and pictures of themselves to help us all learn about each other.  After a child shares, we will ask questions about his or her interests and make connections.  We will also use this as an opportunity to start working a bit on letter formation and pencil grip as each member of the class will make a page for the Totally Terrific Child's book!  I was today's Totally Terrific Child.  Ask your child what he or she learned about me!  If your child has not brought in his or her timeline, please send it in as soon as you can.  I put an extra copy (if your child's was not returned yet) in the Friday Folder.

We have had a lot of fun dancing, singing, and learning together so far!  I am looking forward to our first five-day week!

 Ask your child about...

• Painting birthday crowns
• Making a birthday month graph and an age graph
• The Hip Hop Hokey Pokey Milkshake songs
• Reading The Good Egg and The Bad Seed
• Winning the whole-school game of Four Corners at our first PreK-4 assembly!