Week of February 17, 2020

The kids filled their kindness jar and were able to spend the day at school with their stuffed animals and do special "fun" stations in the afternoon. 

Big Change Round-Up

Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of the donations to the big change round-up. Our class raised $449.70! That is amazing! This is a wonderful cause and this money will help so many children and families at the UVM Children's Hospital.

Reader’s Workshop

     This group of children seem to love to be read to. It is a great time of the day when we all gather on the carpet and enjoy some wonderful stories. This week the children are working on retelling stories that they read or listen to. This is a skill the children could work on at home. After reading to  your child at home, ask him/her to tell you about that story. They should include the characters, the setting, the problem and the solution.

Writer’s Workshop

   Our Eric Carle stories are almost finished! We are hoping to have all of the stories finished shortly after we come back from vacation. The "big kids" came down to our room and helped type our stories on Thursday. We created our covers on Friday.

Winter Break Activities

      Winter Break has arrived! Here are some activities you might consider having your child do during vacation to keep up with skills we have learned at school.

1. Keep a journal about the vacation (have your child write about what he/she does each day). Remember the three rules of sentences

• Start every sentence with a capital letter
• Put spaces between your words
• End every sentence with an ending mark (. , ?, !)

2. Read, read, read

3. Play a card game

4. Play a board game

5. Add numbers together, subtract numbers

6. Sort coins &  talk about their names & values

7. Count forwards, backwards, &  by 10’s

8. Have your child write a story and illustrate

9. Practice reading and writing muscle words.

10. Practice writing their full name (first, middle, last)

Morning Meeting

GREETING: Coin Greeting

ACTIVITY: Money Poem

Muscle Word

   You can find all of the muscle words covered so far on the Writer's Workshop page of this blog. These are great words for the children to practice reading and writing over the vacation.

The Wall of Sparkle

  Many of the children are very interested in learning how to tie their shoes. With interest comes determination...this is a great time to teach your child how to tie his/her own shoes. We have started our “Wall of Sparkle” but it does not have many names on it yet. This is always of great interest to kindergartners. Children who can tie their shoes on their own, have them names made out of glitter and placed on The Wall of Sparkle. Please spend some time over the vacation helping your child with this step to independence. Here are some YouTube links that may help with this activity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKlB5UCrUrU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4q2vKlvuXM

Fundations

    We have been learning about digraphs for the past few weeks. Last week we learned about the ‘th’ digraph. This week we talked about 'sh'.

Math Lessons

  This month our calendar theme has been coins (penny, nickel, dime and quarter). This week the children explored more activities about coins during math time. Our goal is to have the children be able to name the four coins and state their values. Here are some activities the children could do at home.

1. Give your child a handful of coins and have them sort them
2. Read books about coins
3. Hand your child change you get at the store and have them add the coins together.
4. Make patterns out of coins and then say the name and/or value of the coin as they check the pattern.

I hope everyone has a healthy and restful break!

Week of February 10, 2020

 We had a great time celebrating the 100th day of kindergarten!

Reader’s Workshop

     We have become quite skilled in the parts of a story. Next time you read a story to your child ask them the following four questions.

1. Who was the character in the story?

2. What is the setting of the story?

3. What was the problem in the story?

4. How was the problem solved?

     These are all questions we have been asking for the past few weeks during Readers and Writers Workshop. We have talked about story problems and how they are solved and even chatted about many different character traits (ie. brave, shy, silly, persistent…)

Writer’s Workshop

       We continued our work on our Eric Carle inspired stories this week. All of the children picked out their main character, the setting and the problem for their individual stories. Next week we will work on putting our stories together and hopefully start our work as illustrators and create our pictures using collage just like Eric Carle. This unit will most likely continue into the week after our Winter break.

Morning Meeting

GREETING: Skip greeting

ACTIVITY: Sparkle

Math

   This week we celebrated the 100th day of kindergarten! We made special headbands, we counted to 100 in a variety of ways, we made necklaces out of 100 Froot Loops and counted 100 of many things. We even had a special visitor. Zero the Hero came to visit us via Facetime from a land far, far away! This week the children discovered that 100 isn’t as large as they thought.

Fundations

  We are learning about digraphs. A digraph is when two letters work together to make one sound. This week we focused on the sound /th/ makes with the letters ‘t’ and ‘h’. ‘Th’ is a digraph.

Valentine’s Day

      The children really enjoyed passing out the cards they had for each other. It was a little chaotic and some of the valentines may have been placed in the wrong bags but they had a blast. Your child brought home a bag full of cool Valentine cards yesterday. Hopefully you all had a chance to open the bag and enjoy reading the cards. Thank you to everyone for sending in special treats for our afternoon snack.

We painted "Love Bugs" for Valentine's Day

Big Change Round Up

Keep those coins coming in. The children are really

excited about raising money for the UVM Children’s Hospital.

Next week is the last week to collect the coins.

Week of February 3, 2020

Morning Meeting

GREETING: Banana Fanana

ACTIVITY: The Tongue Wizard

Reader’s Workshop

This week’s lessons focused around the parts of a good story. The children are working on picking out the characters in the stories, the setting, the problem and the solution. When you are reading with your child over the next few weeks, ask them to tell you those parts of the story.

The kids made Chinese New Year's masks during their library class this week.

Writer’s Workshop

   This week we finished our Opinion Writing Unit. I was so impressed today when I asked all of the children to write an opinion piece on something they felt very strongly about. They wrote it completely independently from start to finish. I saw kids using spaces between their words and capital letters at the beginning of their writing. I am so proud of how hard they are working on their writing. Please check out the Writer's Workshop page of this blog to see some examples of their writing.

Theme Time

    We have continued our unit on weather, climate and the water cycle. Our focus this week was on different types of weather. The children all shared what their favorite type of weather is and created a page for our class book.

Fundations

    We are working on a few things during Fundations right now. We are learning how to form capital letters, reviewing the formation of lower case letters as well as 'zapping' words in order to put down the correct letters that correspond with the sounds we hear. Ask your child to zap and write a CVC word for you (ie. map, fog, sit, cup, get)

Math Lessons

     It is almost the 100th day of kindergarten! We will celebrate the 100th day of kindergarten on February 13th. We have been getting ready for the 100th day by reading special stories, counting out 100 objects and talking about different ways to count to 100.

Next Week

     Next week we have a few things you may want to be aware of. The 100th day of kindergarten will now be on Thursday, February 13th (due to our snow day on Thursday) and we will be celebrating Valentine's Day on Friday, February 14th. A class list went home a few weeks ago. If you plan on having your child pass out Valentines, please be sure to have them make one for each child in the class so that feelings are not hurt. The children will pass out their Valentine's in the morning and then bring them home to open them that afternoon. We will have a special afternoon snack time. If anyone would like to make a special treat to send in for the class, please let me know on Monday. Thank you!