Dear Parents,

         Here is an overview of what we have accomplished this month.

Morning Meeting: We are using different greetings to enhance social skills and the children are sharing about different topics in their lives each day. As we focused on the Character Strong trait of gratitude this past month, we have been sharing about all of the people and things in our lives we are grateful for. After Calendar routines, we have been working on phonemic awareness games, and we conclude this special time with monthly and seasonal songs each day. 

 

Sound Work: We have learned the formation and sounds of almost all letters of the alphabet! We are enjoying writing these letters on whiteboards, on practice worksheets, identifying words that begin with the letter sounds and listening for these sounds in books. We will start to learn one sight/trick word per week and will create books using these words. 

 

Writing: We created informational label and pattern books about shared class topics and personal topics that were important to us. We learned that book topics have subtopics, and we were able to use patterns as we learned to write sentences that matched our pictures. We are striving to do our best work with letter formation, tapping out the sounds we hear and illustrating detailed pictures for our readers. We celebrated our writing by presenting our books to the class!

 

Reading: We continued to learn the procedures for the three parts of reading workshop (minilesson, reading to ourselves, and reading to our partners). We have learned about fiction books and how to point to pictures and words in order to understand our stories (picture walk). We talked about the characters, their feelings, dialogue and the setting to help us understand the stories that we read. This month we focused on learning and reading poems, nursery rhymes, and songs. We used our fingers to follow the words of each line and verse as we said, sang or even read the text, and we used letter recognition and the sight words we have learned  to recognize to help us follow along. This practice will enhance our skills as new readers! As a culminating activity, we will proudly present favorite rhymes, songs and poems to our classmates.

 

Math: We practiced writing, finding, identifying, ordering, drawing and comparing numbers 1-10, and discovered how to count, add and subtract manipulatives through number stories. We are learning the concepts of addition and subtraction by using the words, "greater/more than & less than/fewer." We learned about types of patterns and classifying items by their attributes. We have played games, used manipulatives and multi-sensory activities and sang songs and raps to learn in math. 

 

SS & Science: We focused on forces and the attributes of balls and ramps during our Forces and Motion/Engineering unit. We created different inclines with our ramps to test which inclines help balls and cars move the fastest and strongest down them. We learned about the forces of push and pull, and identified many different ways that we use these forces during our school day. We concluded our engineering experiments by designing functioning ziplines with different inclines for our stuffed animal friends to race! We read about the history of the first Thanksgiving, and we learned about Pilgrims and Native Americans. We "made" pumpkin pie, shared our own Thanksgiving family traditions and reflected on all we are grateful for in our lives. We created thankful turkey hats to show gratitude for all we have in our lives and sang a special turkey song each day.

 

Our many special events have been added to our shared class pictures folder. Thank you for all you do to support the magic in Kindergarten!