Kindergarten News
Room 121
March 20, 2015
Dear Families,
Did you hear that Lucky Leprechaun came tapping on our door on
Tuesday? After we danced the Rattlin Bog he left a treat of green cookies
and leprechaun gold! I hope you saw your child’s book called Where is
Lucky Leprechaun? and Shamrocks Everywhere. I’m sure you noticed the
position words that we are learning to read.
This was an exciting number week for us as we reached two
milestones. During lunchtime each day we challenge ourselves to be silent
for the same number of seconds as the number of days we’ve been in
school. We’ve been counting the days until we would reach 120 seconds.
On Tuesday we ate without talking for an amazing two whole minutes! We
are very proud! On Wednesday we were excited to reach our 121st day of
school. Ask your child why that is a special number for us. Today we just
enjoyed reading 123! Perhaps you’ve seen some of our effort to solve
multi-step math problems. This week we worked with partners to solve a
problem with Lucky Leprechaun’s gold. A similar problem came home
today as homework. I hope you enjoy seeing how your child approaches
and solves the problem. We work to show our thinking with pictures,
numbers and equations before writing the final answer. If help is needed,
I’m sure you’ll guide the work by asking questions.
We are finishing up our third unit in Math Expressions by learning
about number partners. You might hear our chant of “1 and 4 are partners
of 5, 2 and 3 are partners of 5” and so on. This unit completes our first
activity book. Look for the book to come home next week. As we talked
about long ago at Curriculum Night, we select pages to provide additional
practice on skills presented so you will notice that we have completed
some pages but not all. The children can have fun at home completing the
remaining pages. The book is yours to keep.
In Literacy Centers, we continue to work in small guided reading
groups, with word work activities such as building word families and
practicing sight words, with handy work activities including practice with
letter formations, independently reading in “just right” books, listening to
books on tape and writing. Recently, we have been writing letters to friends
to mail at the post office but this week we began writing about what we’d do
if we met a leprechaun. We are including signal words like then, next and
finally in the story. Next week our writing will include the homework paper
about a favorite trip. We will focus closely on writing a strong lead.
Spring is here! Outdoors we are looking for signs of spring
everywhere. On our walks to music and PE we have noticed blooming
daffodils, greener grass, blue sky, puffy clouds, birds and bugs. At work
stations this week we played a kite sight word game and made really
special kites – running kites! We flew them in the gym this afternoon but I
hope they will have a chance to fly outside this weekend! The “kite words”
from our game (some familiar, some new) are included in your child’s folder
for extra practice at home. Please return the leprechaun problem solving
sheet on Tuesday. Thank you!
You will recall that we will spend time on Monday and Wednesday
with the CogAT assessment. It should not be stressful for any of the
children and they are usually delighted with the fancy pencils!
Our Special K for next week is Paige. We look forward to learning
more about her.
Enjoy the first weekend of spring and March Madness!
Kind regards,
Liz Stewart