May 1-5

Happy Funky Friday! 

Upcoming events:
May 4: Action Figures/Sci Fi Day
May 22: Family Night
May 26: No School

NOTES: 
Teacher Appreciation Week - May 1-5
Help thank our teachers for their hard work. Provide an item for lunch or snacks during Teacher Appreciation Week.  Click on this link to sign up.  Thank you for your support!

A peek at our week: 

Reading:  Readers reread for many reasons! They read the first time to solve tricky words. They can read a book again to make their reading smooth! Then, they can read it a third time to post it funny, interesting, or important parts that they would like to share with their partner!

Writing:  After working hard during boot camp to make our writing easy to read and to write more sentences in our books, writers are ready to tackle true stories! We will start to brain storm by making book covers to help us hang onto our ideas. As readers, we know that we can take a picture walk to understand how a story will go. We will use that idea and quickly draw the pages of the book before we write. It's like a writing picture walk. Then as we think about writing the words, we will say them out loud and ask ourselves “does that make sense?” before writing.

Math: By the end of the year in Kindergarten, students are expected to be fluent within five. This means, they need to be able to add and subtract equations with numbers 5 or less with automatically. This week, we will be working hard to build fluency by doing flashcards and playing games like Addition Crossout.  Here is a copy in case you want to play at home:

Word Study: Here is a link with helpful information about sight words. It also contains a list of 100 frequently encountered sight words. If you feel like your child has a firm grasp on our sight word list, use words from this list! 

Science: Now that we have a better understanding of the characteristics of balls, we will start exploring what they can do! We will explore bounciness on different surfaces, discuss how different balls make different sounds as they bounce, and measure how high they can bounce. Then, at centers, students will test

• The bounciness of each kind of ball (counting the number of bounces)
• How much effort it takes to move it (using a straw to blow)

April 24-28

Upcoming events:
April 28: Funky Friday (dress as silly as you want)
May 4: Action Figures/Sci Fi Day
May 22: Family Night
May 26: No School

NOTES: 
Teacher Appreciation Week - May 1-5
Help thank our teachers for their hard work. Provide an item for lunch or snacks during Teacher Appreciation Week.  Click on this link to sign up.  Thank you for your support!
Fang Reading Program: 
Remember to turn in any Fang forms that you have not turned in already! We are still accepting any and all bases. :)

A peek at our week: 

Reading:  Readers learn to be problem solvers! Even when they get to unknown words in their books, they can use lots of strategies to figure out a word. Here are some of the ways we solve words:

Writing:  ATTENTION! Writers will be having a writing boot camp this week! As we head into the last part of the year, we will push ourselves to do what strong writers ALWAYS do: make writing easy to read and write more and more. We will make our writing easy to read by making sure we have a vowel sound in every word and checking to see words are on the line and sentences have spaces. In order to write more, writers ask questions to add more sentences to the page and set goals of how much writing they can get done in a day.

Math: Here are a few highlights of what students will be doing in math this week:

• Telling, retelling, and writing equations for addition and subtraction stories
• building partners of 10 in many different ways to build fluency
• Practicing showing partners for 7-9
• Building numbers 1-20 with different tools and looking for patterns within the model

Word Study: It is important for Kindergartners to keep practicing sight words so that they can read and write them in a snap. One way we have been working on that in our room is to practice writing sight word sentences. For example, I would say "I like to play with my dog." Students would them practice picturing each sight word as they try to write it automatically. 

Science: Students have been LOVING our research on balls and ramps so far. After looking at videos, books, and pictures, we have come up with three questions to guide our inquiry:

• What makes a ball move?
• What is the ball made of? 
• How are balls the same and different? 

This week, we will begin hands on exploration. Students will explore the characteristics balls and what factors affect movement. 

April 18-21

Welcome back! Hope you enjoyed your break. Having some time to rest and spend time outside will help us jump back into learning for the last stretch of the year! 

Upcoming events:
April 12-17: NO SCHOOL
April 21: Wear Green and Blue for Earth Day
April 28: Funky Friday (dress as silly as you want)

NOTES: 
 KAT pledge forms: 
Last call for KAT pledge forms! We are still collecting through the end of this week. Thank you for the generous pledges. 100% of the donations go directly back to the school! Thanks to all the parents who were able to help.
Birthday Boxes: 
Thank you for all the Birthday Box donations. We will be assembling boxes this Saturday, April 22. If you are interested in helping, please sign up here: http://signup.com/go/fa4ZnY Contact Kristin McEneany at  kristin.mceneany@gmail.com  with any questions.
Teacher Appreciation Week - May 1-5
Help thank our teachers for their hard work. Provide an item for lunch or snacks during Teacher Appreciation Week.  Click on this link to sign up.  Thank you for your support!
Additional Summer School Course Offering:
We are now offering another “Chromebooks and iPads, and Tablets, Oh My!” for grades 4K – 1.
Course Description: Come take a stroll down the "technology road" in Chromebooks and iPads, and Tablets, Oh My! In this course, students will learn how to use a Chromebook, iPad, and Tablet, all while experiencing entertaining and engaging websites and apps! Students will explore mouse skills games, create their own stories with illustrations, publish creations using online tools, and more!

A peek at our week: 

Reading:  As we continue to grow as readers, we will make sure we are asking ourselves, "Does this word make sense? Does it look right? Does is sound right?" If something doesn't seem quite right when solving a tricky word, readers need to go back to fix it up! This week, we will be focusing on thinking of the whole book and using our prior knowledge to decide what would make sense. As you read with your child, make sure to use those 3 questions when they are working to figure out a tricky word! 

Writing:  Our persuasive writing is coming to a close this week and just in time for Earth Day! These writers have been working on writing their opinions about problems they see in the world. To celebrate Earth Day and the end of our unit, students will be creating posters that show lots of writing about a problem. It could be littering, cutting down trees, wasting electricity, etc. We will share our opinion posters with our 3rd grade buddies!

Math: Mathematicians will work with partners of different numbers this week to build fluency and flexibility in adding and subtracting. Students will work to solve word problems and check to see that their picture matches the equation. We will continue our work with teen numbers. You may be wondering, "Why does it sound like students are working on the same concepts so often in math?" To answer that question, we use a spiral curriculum in math. A spiral curriculum introduces a concept and continues to come back to that same concept with each encounter increasing in complexity and reinforcing their learning.

Word Study: This week, students will be working on poems that focus on different word families. Word families are groups of words that have a predictable pattern. For example, bug, tug, and rug all have the ug ending pattern. Learning about these word families is helpful to students for reading and writing!

Science: Science is back in Kindergarten and we are beginning our Balls and Ramps unit! We will begin our inquiry with knowledge building this week. We will study pictures and videos of balls in motion. We will think about what needs to happen for a ball to move and discuss vocabulary such as gravity, motion, push, pull, etc.

A hodge podge of pictures from last week!