Week of 11/27

Dear Parents,

I hope you are all enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving break. I'd like to thank all of you for making the Feast such a success! We had a wonderful spread of food, and the children all looked darling! Thanks to the MANY parents who helped with that event.

Now...onto a very busy but exciting time in kindergarten as we prepare for our Nutcracker performance on the 22nd, as well as continue with all the academics & exciting literature!

Language Arts
We have completed the introduction of all isolated letters & letter sounds. At this point in the school year, your children should recognize all letters and know all of the sounds. If you think your child needs more reinforcement, please use websites such as starfall.com, or have your child watch The Letter Factory. Although we will continue reviewing letter sounds, this is no longer our main focus at this time.

We are now moving onto word endings-- encouraging children to read by "chunking" these sounds. For example, using the endings "an" and "at," children will manipulate the beginning sounds of words and create words such as fan, man, ran, can, pan or mat, bat, cat, rat, etc.

Our sight word this week is look. At the side of this webpage, there is a link for kindergarten websites.  There is one website, http://www.spellingcity.com/k2grist that I'd like you all to check out with your children. This is a fun way to reinforce both the sight words and short-vowel words that they will be expected to recognize and spell in kindergarten. I have pre-loaded the list of sight words onto Spelling City, but if you want to make your own list of short-vowel words, you can do that, too.

Our stories this week will be about Owls, both fiction and non-fiction. We will be learning and writing about Owls, along with doing an owl art project.

Parent helpers, we will return to centers for the next three weeks, then we take a break from centers again the week of December 18th. Please check the helper schedule.

Math
We are beginning Module 2 in Eureka Math: Two Dimensional & Three Dimensional Shapes. We will study the attributes of the 2D shapes square, triangle, rectangle, circle, and hexagon. The 3D shapes we will be studying are the cube, cylinder, cone, and sphere. Parent tips for this unit can be found here.

STEAM
STEAM centers are back this Friday in preparation for Hour of Code next week. On Friday, we will have a new exciting center that we purchased last year with money from a Home & School Club grant. Children will look at the laws of physics using a game called Create-a-Chain Reaction. We will also make boats out of foil and test them out by seeing how well they can carry different amounts of pennies.

Upcoming
I am going to be working on the 2018 helper schedule in the upcoming weeks. Please let me know if your schedule has changed at all (a different day would be better for you) or if you would like to be added more regularly to the helper schedule. I'm hoping everyone can stay on as center helpers in 2018, but if you are no longer able to help, please let me know that too. If you'd like to request specific date(s) please feel free to email those to me. Thanks again to everyone for being so reliable with classroom help-- we couldn't run the program the way we do without all of you!

Please be setting aside time out of your busy holiday schedules to join us for our presentation of The Nutcracker on December 22nd at 10:00 a.m.!

This Week's Helpers & Activities:
Monday: Daily 5, Centers (Celeste & Lynda)
Tuesday: Daily 5, Centers (Josie & Camille)
Wednesday: Writer's Workshop, PE with Coach Sierra, Blue Bags Go Home

Thursday: Daily 5, Centers (Emily W. & Tanya)
Friday: Daily 5, STEAM Centers (Mary & Celeste), Story time with Grandma Gail

Upcoming Events
Week of 12/4: Computer Science Education Week
Friday 12/22: Kindergarten Nutcracker Performances
12/25-01/07: Winter Break
Monday 01/15: Martin Luther King Holiday
02/19-02/23: President's Week Vacation