Week of 11/28

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.

We have an assembly on Monday. Author Steve Suskin, who wrote a book we use for Cornerstone called Don't Laugh at Me, will do a presentation for the students. We are looking forward to meeting an author!

Now...onto a very busy but exciting time in kindergarten as we prepare for our Nutcracker performance on the 16th, 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 most to all of the sounds. If you think your child needs more reinforcement, please use websites such as lexia.com, starfall.com, or have your child watch The Letter Factory DVD. 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. The endings we will focus on in the upcoming week are "an" and "at." We 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 you. 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 different versions of The Gingerbread Man. We will be comparing two different versions in particular: The Gingerbread Boy by Paul Galdone and The Gingerbread Girl by Lisa Campbell Ernst. We have some fun activities and art projects surrounding both these stories.
We will return to centers for the next two weeks, then we take a break from centers again the week of December 12th. Please check the helper schedule.

This week's sharing is Book Share. Please have your child bring in a favorite book and be prepared to tell: 1) The Title  2) A bit about what the book is about  3) Show a favorite page (please bookmark).

Math
We are beginning Module 3 in Eureka Math: Comparison of Weight, Length, Capacity, and Numbers to 10. Parent tips can be found here. This week, we will be looking at the different length of things. We will have an exciting activity during center time where we will measure things around the room.

STEAM
STEAM centers are back this Friday in preparation for Hour of Code next week. On Friday, we will have two new exciting centers that we purchased with money from a Home & School Club grant. The children will be introduced to basic architecture using a game called Blocks & Blueprints. They will also look at the laws of physics using another game called Engineer-a-Coaster.

Upcoming
Thank you for returning your blue bags last week. If you still have a white envelope, please send it in on Monday.  Blue Bags will go home for the next two weeks. They will not go home on December 14th.

I am going to be working on the 2017 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 2017, but if you are no longer able to help, please let me know that too.

Please be setting aside time out of your busy holiday schedules to join us for our presentation of The Nutcracker on December 16th at 10:00 a.m.!

This Week's Helpers & Activities:
Monday: No Centers (Author Assembly), Sharing
Tuesday: Centers (Claire K. & Claire L), Sharing
Wednesday: PE with Coach Sierra, Sharing

Thursday: Centers (Alison & Chris), Sharing
Friday: Sharing, STEAM Centers (Chris/Janette), Story time with Grandma Gail

Upcoming Events:
11/21-11/25: Thanksgiving Vacation

Monday 11/28: Cornerstone Author presentation
Wednesday 12/07: Art Vista Presentation

Friday 12/16: Kindergarten Nutcracker Performances
12/19-01/02: Winter Break
Friday 1/13: Staff Development Day, No School
Monday 1/16: Martin Luther King Day, No School