Dear Parents,
I believe we now have almost everyone receiving our e-mails. Thank you for responding to our various tests. If you haven’t replied to one of the e-mails to let us know you are receiving it, please do so. Otherwise, we will check in with you at Back-to-School Night to make sure we have all addresses entered correctly. Also, we still need those pink “Rules for RESPECT” signature sheets, as well as the Student Handbook signature sheet from a few families. Please send those in on Monday if you can.
We had a great first week searching for and finding our runaway Gingerbread Men and getting to know one another, along with beginning our Language Arts workbook! Right now, our workbook pages are focusing on a quick overview of the alphabet—one letter a day, in alphabetical order. We familiarize ourselves with all the names of our classmates by looking for those letters in each person’s name. Of course, when we are done with our overview, we will begin a more intense study of each letter—a week per consonant/vowel, along with meeting that letter’s “Alphafriend.” The Alphafriends go along with our reading program and help the children remember letter names & sounds in a fun & catchy way.
We will also begin our math program this week. Our first unit is on sorting & classifying. Children will study how things are alike and different, and sort them accordingly. We will have a week-long science unit on the five senses as well.
In the next few weeks, we will be listening to familiar tales (Three Pigs, Three Billy Goats Gruff, etc.) and nursery rhymes. Hearing different versions of familiar tales and rhymes is a fun way to get children engaged in reading.
During the past week, we have observed that many of our students will need to work on name-writing skills. One of our kindergarten standards is writing a name with one capital letter and the rest lower-case. We will begin practicing this in class by tracing our names on a worksheet, but we encourage you to reinforce this at home. The faster children can write their names correctly, the easier it is for them to get going on assignments, as we encourage them to write their names first. We appreciate your help with this.
In class, your child will be using a program called, "Handwriting without Tears." This is a wonderful program that really focuses on correct formation of letters along with correct pencil grip. We find that it is so important to get in good habits (and in some cases, break bad habits) with handwriting early on. We have already begun the basics of this program, and we will use it in conjunction with our letter program in language arts. So when your child is learning about the letter "s," s/he will also be learning the correct formation of that letter.
Back-to-School Night is this Wednesday at 6:00 in K2. This is a night for parents only, as we go over our curriculum and classroom policies. Please make every effort to attend. We cover a lot of information that night in only 45 minutes, so afterward, if you need more information on anything, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Please also plan on attending the Home & School Club meeting in the cafeteria immediately following our presentation. If you are unable to attend Back-to-School Night, please let us know so that we can set aside materials for you.
As mentioned last week, one item we will be covering during our meeting is the Consolidated Classroom Payment. It looks like this payment will be between $65 & $70. Again, this payment goes directly to your child’s “extra” items during the year, such as field trip and bus fees, binders that we buy for them, class t-shirts for each child, etc. Please make every effort to make this payment. If for some reason we don’t spend all of the money, it stays with your child and will go toward their first grade consolidated payment. It is a lot easier to collect this payment at Back-to-School Night, so we’d appreciate it if you bring your checkbooks and attach your payment to your Home & School Club membership form that we will have you fill out that night. If this payment is a hardship, the Home & School Club does help supplement the CCP money for our grade level. Thank you in advance for your support with this payment—it helps us do a lot of projects and activities that would otherwise not be possible.
Some of you have asked about classroom help. We will put our parent helper opportunities back out at Back-to-School Night, then make our final schedule. You will find out which days you are officially helping after we have a chance to look over all of the information, and make sure we have coverage for all the activities and days. If you signed up to help at center time, we will begin centers the week of September 12th. Thank you to so many of you who signed up to help at the Orientation—we already have most of our activities covered! I know we do still need Thursday center helpers and a Wednesday envelope/Red Bag person, so we’ll hope for a few more volunteers at Back-to-School Night.
There is no school this Friday, September 3rd, or Monday, September 6th. Friday there will be a staff development meeting throughout the district, and Monday is of course Labor Day.
We are looking forward to another fun week with your children, and we are excited to meet and talk with you all Wednesday night!
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Wednesday, September 1st @ 6:00: Back-to-School Night
Friday, September 3rd: No School-- Teacher Inservice Day
Monday, September 6th: No School-- Labor Day
Tuesday, September 14th: Great American Fundraiser Ends
Friday, September 17th: Back-to-School Picnic & Movie Night
