Dear Parents,

I hope you have a wonderful spring break with your child!

 

Morning Meeting: We have focused on Cooperation in our Character Strong unit to build our character and enhance social skills this past month. My students are sharing about different ways they demonstrate honesty in their words, choices and actions each day and we strive to follow directions and expectations and work together using cooperation. We are using different greetings to enhance social skills and the children are sharing about different topics in their lives each day. After Calendar routines, we have been working on activities with phonemic awareness, rhyming, syllables and now listening for digraphs. I have seen wonderful progress in these areas!

 

Sound Work: Now that we know all lowercase and uppercase letters of the alphabet, we are spelling and writing CVC words ourselves, identifying beginning, middle and final sounds in words, learning about digraphs, creating rhyming families, and practicing our letter formation.  We are continuing to learn one sight/trick word per week and have created books using these words. We are listening to and writing sentences, and we now know to use a beginning uppercase letter, spaces, and periods in each sentence we write.

 

Writing: We wrote personal narratives about small, special moments in our lives with a clear beginning, middle and end, a closing sentence and an “About the Author” page. We learned how to add details and labels to our pictures so that our readers can better understand our writing. We have continued to use the process of writing as we plan, share, draw and write about our exciting ideas. 

 

Reading: We learned about fiction books, reread emergent readers and talked about the characters, their feelings, dialogue and the setting to help us understand the stories that we read. We learned the different story elements (characters, setting, plot events, problem, resolution, and big idea) and have practiced identifying these in our stories.We practiced retelling stories and giving the gist of the story, to better focus on retelling only the main and important events. We did this as a class, then worked together in teams to put the “puzzle pieces” of stories together. Finally, each of us was able to identify the elements and important parts of their own books in their book bin.  I continue to meet in guided reading groups with my students each week at their reading levels as they blossom into independent readers. Please continue to read to and with your child at home using books at their reading level. Ask them questions about the story elements and have them retell the main, important events of the stories. Encourage them to make connections from their lives to the text.

 

Math: This month we learned more about the tricky teen numbers, their place values,  how they all begin with the number 1, and they all represent a group of ten with some left over. We noticed how each group of tens begins with the same number. We sang rap songs, used games and played with many fun manipulatives like # cards, jewels and ten frames with counters to name, compare and model teen numbers. We have concretely modeled addition and subtraction number stories through the use of manipulatives and activities. We are now counting by 2s to 20 and 5s and 10s to 100 by singing Macarena Math; we get faster each day!

 

SS & Science: During SS, we learned about many different Community Helpers through books videos, crafts, hands-on activities and games. We learned about each helper’s job and purpose and the tools they use. We reflected about our favorite community helpers and what we would like to be when grown up. We then learned about geography and maps, and we expanded our view from our house in our community to our town, state, country, continent and planet, and we learned about how to read and use maps and globes. We created a map project and learned about continents and oceans. We discovered where we are on the map from our home and town, state, country, continent to planet Earth. We strapped on our seatbelts and used Google Earth to travel from space to our school and back again each day!  We are welcoming and celebrating springtime with beautiful crafts that reflect our appreciation for our Earth and nature.

  

It is a joy to teach your children every day! I look forward to the adventures that lie ahead for us this year! Thank you for your continued cooperation and support in making kindergarten a smooth and magical experience for your child!