Week of 10/2

Field Trip
This week, a permission slip will be coming home with your child in the Wednesday envelope for our first field trip to Spina Farms Pumpkin Patch. We are very excited for this trip! For all field trips at Alta Vista, children travel by school bus to the location. The trip is on October 25th, and children will come to school as usual from 8:05 to 11:25. Please sign the permission slip and return it in your child's Wednesday envelope the next day or by October 15th at the latest. More information will follow about the limited number of chaperones we can bring on this trip.

Walkathon
Please continue signing your children up for the walkathon on October 21st, which is only three weeks away!  Go to:  http://www.altavistawalkathon.org  to register or solicit sponsors for your children. Not only does it help raise money for all of the wonderful enrichment programs at our school, but it is a great community event. There is so much to do besides the walking!  Come out and enjoy the day.

And...since I've heard many of your children talking about soccer, I wanted to let you know that if you have to leave for a soccer game (or come a little later because of soccer) please let the people at the check-in desk know.  Your child gets 10 laps of credit for soccer games or other outside sports obligations that they have during the walkathon event.

Walk to School Day
This Wednesday, October 4th, is National Walk to School Day Please try to participate and walk or scooter or ride a bike to school that day versus driving a car. We are trying to encourage healthier ways of getting to school which also reduce the traffic congestion around schools.

Art Vistas
We will have our first Art Vista lesson this week. This is a program that is paid for by the Home & School Club through your generous donation to fundraisers like the Walkathon. In Art Vistas, children look at a group of lithographs by various artists. They look for a particular element in those pictures, like colors, lines, shading, etc.  Then they create their own art project modeled after the prints they saw. Thank you to Tanya Winn & Jason Smiley for leading Art Vistas this year.

Center Time
Parent center helpers: I'd like to update the center start time to 10:00. I am finding that we are needing an extra ten minutes or so in the first block of time in the morning to work on our Daily 5 Literacy Program. If you can please plan on 10:00 to 11:15 or so, I think that is more realistic for our classroom schedule. Thanks in advance for your flexibility!

Language Arts:

In class this week, we will be focusing on the letters Mm and Nn. Our plan is to have all letters introduced by the end of the first trimester, which is coming up in early November. If you are noticing that your child is having difficulty recognizing letters and knowing letter sounds, especially those that we've introduced already (A-L), please provide additional reinforcement at home. As the kindergarten year continues, it becomes very difficult to keep up with the pace of the curriculum if your child is still not mastering letter recognition and sounds. Good reinforcement is available by watching Leap Frog's The Letter Factory, which is available on Netflix streaming or on YouTube. There is also a website & app called starfall.com which is excellent. Finally the video series we are using in class, called HeidiSongs, is available here, and streams on Vimeo.

Our story this week is called The Dot, by Peter H. Reynolds. This is a wonderful story that encourages readers to "make your mark, and see where it takes you." Our sight word this week is the. The sight words we've introduced so far are: I, see, my, like, and can. Please also continue reinforcing these words at home and listening to your child read the sight word sentences that come home weekly. These will now be in your child's Wednesday envelope each week.

Math:

In math, we continue our topic on numbers to 10.  Children will continue counting objects and writing numbers to 10. Most of our math involves hands-on activities in small-group centers. That is why you often don't see math papers in the Wednesday envelopes, but we do have daily math activities and lessons in class.

Science:
This week and next, we will be looking closely at leaves. We have many stories, both fiction and non-fiction, to share about leaves.

**Please send in your child's Blue Bag tomorrow, and your child's envelope if you haven't already. They will go home as usual this week on Wednesday.

This Week's Helpers & Activities:
Monday: Return Blue Bags, Daily 5, Centers (Camille & Ying)
Tuesday: Daily 5, Centers (Anastasia & Celeste)
Wednesday: Walk to School Day, Art Vistas, Recess 101, Blue Bags go home
Thursday: Daily 5, Centers (Tanya & Surbhi)
Friday: Daily 5, STEAM Centers (Mary & Daniela), Story time with Grandma Gail

Upcoming Events:
Saturday 10/21: Alta Vista Walkathon
Wednesday 10/25: Field trip to Spina Farms Pumpkin Patch
Tuesday 10/31: Halloween Parade & Party
Monday 11/6: Parent-Teacher Conferences begin
Thursday 11/9: No School: Staff Development Day
Friday 11/10: No School: Veteran's Day
Friday 11/17: Friendship Feast
Friday 12/22: Kindergarten Nutcracker Performances