Please send in your child's Blue Bag on Monday, but they will not go home this Wednesday due to the upcoming Thanksgiving break. White envelopes will go home, so please make every effort to return those on Thursday so that they don't get misplaced over the break.
We will be taking a look at Fall leaves this week. Please have your child go on a "leaf walk" and bring in a small baggie of 5-10 leaves by Tuesday. We will be looking at them and doing some leaf rubbings.
Centers and our regular schedule will resume this week. Please see below for our center helpers this week. Additionally, I have added dates to the helper calendar for early 2020. Please check the Sign-Up Genius.
Language Arts
We have now 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 review at home using the letters & sounds songs we used in class, which can be found here. Although we will continue reviewing letter sounds, this is no longer our main focus at this time.
We are now moving onto word families-- 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 words this week are no and my. At the side of this webpage, there is a tab for "High Frequency Words." Each week, I add an asterisk to the words we've introduced. It would be good to check in on this list with your child to see if s/he recognizes all the starred words.
Our stories this week will be about Fall and Thanksgiving. We began a non-fiction book last week about life in Plymouth for the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower. The children have been very interested in this! We will continue reading from that book this week.
Math
We will begin Module 4, Number Pairs, Addition & Subtraction to 10. This is an extremely important part of our kindergarten math program, and we dedicate a large amount of time to this module. In fact, we will be on this module until the end of January. Parent tips for this module can be found here. I do recommend that you look these over, because there will be some new vocabulary for those of you who do not have older students who have done the Eureka math program. Of particular importance are the words "compose" (finding numbers that add up to a given number-- like 3 & 2 compose 5) "decompose" (take apart a number-- like 5 can be 4 & 1) and number bonds (a model to show mathematical thinking).
Upcoming
Please be setting aside time out of your busy holiday schedules to join us for our presentation of The Nutcracker on December 19th at 10:00 a.m.!
This Week's Helpers & Activities:
Monday: Return Blue Bags, Daily 5, Centers (Hema & Claire)
Tuesday: Daily 5, Centers (Claire & John)
Wednesday: Rhythm & Moves P.E., Music, No Blue Bags
Thursday: Return Weds. Envelopes, Daily 5, Centers (Naomi & Carole)
Friday:Tabletop Turkey Project (Tiffany H., Claire, Zoe), Feast @ 10:00
Upcoming Events:
Friday 11/22: Friendship Feast at 10:0011/25-11/29: Thanksgiving Break
12/9-12/15: Hour of Code/Computer Science Week
Thursday 12/19: Nutcracker Performance at 10:00
12/21-01/05: Winter Break
Friday 01/17: No School: Professional Development DayFriday 11/22: Friendship Feast at 10:0011/25-11/29: Thanksgiving Break
12/9-12/15: Hour of Code/Computer Science Week
Thursday 12/19: Nutcracker Performance at 10:00
12/21-01/05: Winter Break
Monday 01/20: No School: MLK Day
Tuesday 01/28: 100 Day
02/17-02/21: President's Week Vacation
