Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope that you all have a wonderful and relaxing time with family and friends next week!  Please note there is no school the entire week.  School resumes on Monday, December 2nd.  Wow...it's hard to believe we will already be in December!

This week in our Scholastic News we learned about the First Thanksgiving and learned about the Wampanoag people and the Pilgrims and what life was like for the children. We compared how their lives were the same and different.  We also read books called Bear Gives Thanks,  I Am Thankful and Thanksgiving is for Giving Thinks and talked about what it means to be grateful and thankful.  Then then the children shared what they are thankful for and we added them to our fun turkeys from last week.  Be sure to check your child's folder for their thankful turkey!

We finished our community unit this week by completing a mural together that represents our Shelburne Community.  We brainstormed the people, places, and the things in our environment that we might see in Shelburne and then the children made those out of paper and added them to our mural.  Our mural looks fantastic!  We are certainly familiar with our community!

This week in writing , we started something BIG!  We have been drawing all of our stories thus far and making our pictures with many details. This week we learned how to add words or labels to our stories to help the reader better understand what is happening.  We learned how to stretch a word out and listen for the sounds and write down the letters that make those sounds.  I was so impressed with these Kindergarten writers!  Everyone wrote labels for their illustrations in their stories!

During our literacy time, we learned the letters "l" and "j" this week.  We learned how to form the letters, make the sounds of the letters, and identify words that begin with those sounds.  Can your child tell you the sounds those letters make?  We were also introduced to a new sight word in our Scholastic News magazine: do.  You will see in your child's Friday Folder a list of the Kindergarten sight words and the ones we have learned so far.  I have also added some activities, if your child wants to practice reading and writing our sight words.

In math, we began talking about addition and writing equations.  We began by talking about the + symbol and the = symbol and what those mean in the math world.  We learned that the = can mean equal, but also "the same as".  We then used this knowledge to solve some addition story problems about bicycles while practicing writing equations.  Way to go mathematicians!  We also learned a new Work Place called Grab Bag More or Less.  In this game we focused on the concepts of greater than and less than and figuring out how many more cubes were in one person's train than the other.

Lastly, we had our Nearby Nature lesson this week!  We are still focusing on habitats, but this month we explored the habitats in snags and fallen logs.  We began with a puppet show and then sent a log through a "time-machine" to see what happens over time with a log on the forest floor.  We also had the opportunity to dig through and investigate some fallen logs to look for any life.  We certainly found some little creatures crawling around!  Be sure to ask your child about the log he or she investigated?  Did the group find anything in their log?  Thanks Christine and Jackson for another great lesson...the children had a lot of fun!!

Have a wonderful weekend!