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

Week of 11/13

I hope you are all enjoying a long weekend. In the upcoming week, we will continue parent-teacher conferences through Thursday. I have enjoyed meeting with many of you so far, and have gained some great insights about your children from you. Thank you for meeting with me and being such active participants in your child's education. I look forward to meeting with the rest of you this week.  For this week, all conferences will continue to be in the office conference room, right next to the principal's office, except for the morning conferences. Those will be in K2. If you need to confirm your conference time, click here.

There will be no classroom centers this week, due to conferences and preparations for the Feast. Centers will resume after Thanksgiving. There will also be no blue bags again this week due to the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Wednesday envelopes will come home as usual. Please send the envelopes back on Thursday or Friday at the latest. Thank you!

Language Arts
Our final letters will be introduced this week-- Yy and Zz. This means that we will be doing much more blending and spelling short-vowel words now. We will focus on word endings, such as "at," "an," etc. to read and spell words like cat, bat, rat, fan, man, pan, etc. Our sight word will continue to be you since last week was so short.

We will be reading many stories about Thanksgiving and learning about the Pilgrims and Native Americans as we prepare for our Friendship Feast on Friday.

Math
We have some fun Thanksgiving-themed math pages to do this week to wrap up our study on numbers, and we will also begin talking about shapes as we create a scarecrow made out of many different 2D shapes.

Science/Social Studies
We will take a closer look at the Pilgrims & Native Americans as we talk about the first Thanksgiving & prepare for our reenactment of this event, our Friendship Feast on the 17th. We have some interesting books that we will be reading to the children about life during the time of the Pilgrims. It would be wonderful if you can all join us for the Feast on Friday, even if you can only come briefly. The children look so cute in their costumes & love sharing the meal with family members. They will sing a couple of songs for you and then we will get started with the meal. Younger siblings are welcome if there is a child care issue. Thank you to everyone for sending in food for the event! The sign-ups are looking good, but more food is always welcome! You can check out the sign-ups here: https://goo.gl/xgjxJg

Upcoming Events
We are glazing our clay projects this Tuesday, as it was rescheduled from last week. Please don't send your children in any special outfits that day, as the clay glaze does stain. Please contact Tanya if you can help with this. We will be glazing at about 10:00 at the picnic table outside our classroom.

Looking ahead on your calendars at this busy time of year, I wanted to make sure that you are all marking your calendars for Friday, December 22nd at 10:00-- our annual performance of The Nutcracker. This is something that you will not want to miss. To help you clear your calendar, the kindergarten teachers do our class holiday party and the Nutcracker performance all on the same day. We will have a big "cast party" after the performance so that we can send the kids off on a great holiday break!

Have a great week & I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving break!

This Week's Helpers & Activities:

Monday: Return Blue Bags (Touria), Daily 5, Song Practice for Feast

Tuesday: Daily 5, Clay (Tanya, Camille, Surbhi, Anastasia), Song Practice

Wednesday:  Recess 101, No Blue Bags, Song Practice

Thursday: Return Weds. Envelopes, Song Practice 

Friday: Friendship Feast @ 10:00, helpers begin arriving @ 8:45

Upcoming Events:

Monday 11/13-11/16: Parent-Teacher Conferences continue

Friday 11/17: Friendship Feast

Week of 11/20: No School: Thanksgiving Break

Friday 12/22: Kindergarten Nutcracker Performances

Week of 11/6

We have a short week ahead of us with a Staff Development Day on Thursday (no school) and Veteran's Day on Friday. However, please be aware that there is no change to the daily kindergarten schedule due to conferences. The early dismissal only affects grades 1-5. Because of the short week, we will not be sending home Blue Bags this Wednesday. Enjoy a relaxing long weekend!

We had such a busy week last week that I forgot to welcome our student teacher, Miss Soraya, to our class. Soraya is joining us from Santa Clara University and will be with us through Thanksgiving. She will return to us again in the new year and will be more involved in lesson planning and teaching the students at that time. Welcome, Soraya!

I am looking forward to meeting with each of you beginning Monday for your child's conference. All conferences will be held in the office conference room, except for the 7:30 am time slot, which will be held in the classroom. The conference room is located in the main office, 2nd door to the right after you walk through the swinging half-door.  Miss Soraya may join in on a few conferences as well. To confirm your conference time, please click here: https://goo.gl/nFbxE7. Please note that you can no longer edit this form. If you need to change your conference time, please email me.

Language Arts
Our letters this week are Ww and Xx. Our new sight word is you, which we will continue to reinforce next week as well. We are now reading sentences with the words: I, see, my, like, can, go, see, a, the, to, we, you. We have been sending home a list of sentences each week in your child's Wednesday envelope that they are reading in class. Please be sure to have your child read these sentences to you so that you can see how they are doing with sight word recognition and reading fluency.

We will be focusing on the season of Fall this week as well as making some items for our Native American costumes. Our books will center around those themes.

Math
In math this week, we will continue reviewing number concepts. We will reinforce the concept of more & less as well as look at the parts that can make up the number 5 (pre-addition skills).

Upcoming Events
We will be glazing our clay projects this Wednesday! Thank you to Camille & Tanya for organizing this. I'm sure they could use more helping hands! Clay will begin right at the start of the day, when they will be setting up. Please email Tanya if you can assist.

As you know, our next big event is the Friendship Feast on November 17th. Children will dress as Pilgrims and Native Americans and come together with their friends in K1 to sing a few songs and share some food. A sign-up form for the food and helping at that event can be found here. Ideally, we would like each family to contribute something from this list. We need many helpers and plenty of food to make this a success. We are looking forward to a fun event!

This Week's Helpers & Activities:

Monday: Return Blue Bags (Ying), Daily 5, Centers (Camille & Chris H.)

Tuesday: Daily 5, Centers (Anastasia & Lawrence)

Wednesday: Clay (Tanya, Camille, Surbhi, ???), Recess 101, No Blue Bags

Thursday: NO SCHOOL

Friday: NO SCHOOL

Upcoming Events:

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

Week of 11/20: No School: Thanksgiving Break

Friday 12/22: Kindergarten Nutcracker Performances