Dear Parents,

 

        I want to thank our homeroom parents for creating Halloween goody bags for my students! I appreciate all that you did to create and decorate our class pumpkin with our class for the Trunk-or-Treat event! 

 

 

 

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

 

Morning Meeting: We are using different greetings to enhance social skills and we focus on our monthly Character Strong theme each day; this past month we have focused on the trait of responsibility along with respect. We are striving to be responsible in all we say and do. We share about different topics, sing songs and play phonemic awareness, rhyming and math games.

 

 

 

Sound Work: We have learned the formation and sounds of the new letters c, o, a, g, d, s, e, r, j & p. We are enjoying making lists of words that begin with our letter sounds and writing these letters on whiteboards and on practice worksheets. We look for objects that begin with these sounds in picture hunts and around our room and school. We listen for these sounds in read-alouds and create letter booklets for each letter as well. By the end of kindergarten, students are expected to know all letters and sounds. We use these foundational skills in reading and writing each and every day, so practice at home will enhance your child's confidence and success! 

 

 

 

Writing: We have learned the process of writing as we plan, share, draw and write about our ideas. We are creating informational label about shared class topics, the farm and fall themes, and personal topics that are important to us, like our costumes. We learned that book topics have subtopics and we wrote words that matched our pictures. We celebrate 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 are learning about fiction books and how to point to pictures and words in order to understand our stories. We talked about the characters, and how watching and listening to their actions, feelings, and dialogue helps us understand the stories that we read. We also focused on predicting story events and using transition words to retell stories. 

 

 

 

Math: We practiced writing, finding, identifying, ordering, comparing and drawing sets for numbers 1-10, and discovered how to count and add manipulatives. We are using ten frames to organize objects, build towers up to 10, and use sorting mats to identify numbers and collections. We are counting higher and higher each day, and we are learning that by counting we are adding one more. We have started learning the concepts of greater than/less than with different games as well as concepts of addition and subtraction through role-play activities. We have played games, used manipulatives and sang songs to learn in math.

 

 

 

Science: 

 

We celebrated the month of harvest by learning about the parts and life cycles of sunflowers, apples and pumpkins before and after our fabulous field trip to the farm! We started learning about ramps during our Forces and Motion/Engineering unit. We learned about the forces of push and pull, and identified many different ways that we use these forces during our school day. We made predictions about which type of balls would bounce best and roll fastest down ramps. We created different inclines with our ramps to test which inclines help balls and cars move the fastest and strongest down them.  

 

 

 

I have taken many pictures of your children (from Halloween, Scarecrow Day, Farm Field Trip, , etc.) that I have shared with via our shared folder. 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!