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!