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!
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