Wonderful Winter!

Wow! It seems that winter has finally settled in to stay! With two snow days already under our belts, we are trying to maintain a routine in the classroom! In preparation for the second quarter report cards that will be sent home on Friday, February 4th, I have been assessing each child's progress in all academic areas. I have been very pleased with the results and I can't believe how far the students have come in just a half a year. This amazing growth is one of the main reasons that I love teaching kindergarten so much! I hope you are as impressed by the progress as I am!

As the new quarter begins, we will be focusing on reading and writing simple words by "finger tapping." Ask your child to show you what this is! Some of the simple words we have practiced include: mat, set, rug, and many more! We will also be learning to read high-frequency words and we will begin learning how to read predictable, repetitive texts. In math, we will be learning more about teen numbers, practicing with ten frames, we will continue to practice number writing, and we will begin to explore the concepts of addition and subtraction.

During theme time, we just wrapped up a unit on Liquids and Solids. We learned about what both of these things are and we talked a great deal about changing states of matter. Please enjoy the slide show of when we made Oobleck and ice cream (not at the same time!)

Customize your own free picture slideshow

We are currently doing an author study about Jan Brett and all of her wonderful books. Please visit her website for some amazing activities and ideas! The web address is: http://www.blogger.com/www.JanBrett.com. Next week, we will begin to learn about the ocean, a topic that is of great interest in Room Eight!

Next week marks our 100th Day of School! You should have received a letter about completing a 100th day project with your child. Because of the snow days we've had, this special day will now take place on Wednesday, February 9th. We will have many different activities to complete during the day and will tour the Primary Wing to admire all of the students' projects. Please let me know if you have any questions about this.

On Monday, February 14th, we will celebrate our friendships and Valentine's Day. Your child is invited to bring valentine cards to school to share with classmates. I ask that, if you choose to do this, you send enough valentines for each child in the class. I will be providing a special treat to enjoy during the day.

Please remember to continue to send your child to school prepared to go outside for recess. That means that he or she should have snowpants, boots, a warm jacket, a hat, and mittens or gloves. We go outside unless the temperature is below zero. It is also a good idea to make sure that your child has a pair of shoes to wear while indoors. Thank you for your help
with this!

Have a wonderful, wintry weekend!

Happy Holidays!

During this busy holiday season, we have been hard at work in our kindergarten classroom! We have just wrapped up a unit on Holidays Around the World, learning about Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas in a number of countries. Hopefully, you enjoyed the projects that came home, including the egg-carton menorah, the kinara, the Christmas tree, and the ornaments for your homes!

In literacy, we are practicing alphabetizing letters and we are reviewing uppercase letter formation. We are also working hard on beginning sounds of words and, after vacation, will move to listening to the ending sounds of words. We worked on early reading skills in small reading groups with some "just right" books (hopefully your child completed his or her "homework" and read you the book they practiced!)

We also started Writer's Workshop a few weeks ago, and the children are always anxious to write just like real authors! During our writing time, we practice the following steps of the writing process:
1.) Think of something that happened in your life.
2.) Draw your idea.
3.) Write letters, sounds, words, or scribbles about your picture.


The children look forward to Writer's Workshop and I am always impressed with how much they can put on the paper, even in kindergarten! Over the next few months, we will continue to learn more about the writing process and how to "publish" a favorite piece.

In math, we have learned about comparing quantities, growing patterns, and we have been practice numeral writing. Enjoy this picture of our Ladybug Growing Pattern!


On Tuesday this week, we had a visit from our fifth grade reading buddies. Together, we designed and decorate gingerbread houses (and maybe even ate a little candy!!)

Make a digital slideshow

Thank you to everyone who sent in the yummy food for our Holiday Breakfast! We had a fabulous day together and your children have been positively giddy with excitement about the coming holiday celebrations. I hope you enjoy their enthusiasm as much as I have! Have a fantastic, relaxing, and cheerful vacation with your families!

Reminders

I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing Thanksgiving holiday! The children came back refreshed and ready to continue our great learning. Everyone is abuzz about the upcoming holiday season!

Important Reminders for the Coming Weeks:

*Holiday Food Drive: Now-Mid-December Classes will be collecting non-perishable food items to donate to our local food shelf. Please send in cans and boxes of food with your child. There is a box in our classroom for food collection. Thank you in advance for helping families in need at this time of year!

*H.C.S. Open House and Dinner: Wednesday, December 8 5:00-7:00 p.m. Please join us for dinner and take some time to visit our classroom and see what goes on here all day long! Children will be excited to share their hard work with their families. I look forward to seeing you all there!

Halloween Party Sign Up

On Friday, October 29th, we will be celebrating Halloween with a costume parade and a party! Children are invited to BRING their costumes to school with them on Friday (please do not send costume accessories such as wands, swords, etc., as they have a tendency to get lost!) We will change into our costumes before the class party and participate in a Kindergarten Costume Parade! If you are able to sign up to send a treat in for our party, it would be greatly appreciated! Follow the link below or send me an email to let me know what you can send in. Thank you in advance for your help!

Halloween Party Sign Up

Our Many Colored Days!

We just wrapped up our exciting and fun "Color Week!" On Monday, we had a terrific field trip to the Flynn Theater to see Harold and the Purple Crayon. The show was filled with amazing actors, funny moments, and a sense of magical adventure and all of the children were thrilled to watch the show! Thank you to the parents who chaperoned the trip. We can't wait until our next field trip!

During Color Week, we completed many activities to learn about colors. We read some great books about colors, completed a painting activity to learn about color mixing, voted for our favorite colors (red was the winner in our class!), played Color Bingo, and completed a Color Scavenger Hunt. On Friday of last week, we finally enjoyed the greatly anticipated "Rainbow Jell-O." Each day, we made Jell-O in our color of the day. By Friday, we had a rainbow in our cups and our jiggly snack was so much fun to eat! Please enjoy the photos of our special snack here:
Thank you all for helping your children dress for our Color of the Day! We had so much fun celebrating some of the beautiful colors in our world and using them to create beautiful artwork!

Our Busy Weeks at School

Wow! It is hard to believe that it is already almost the middle of October! We have been hard at work in our classroom learning and playing together. Your children are quite comfortable with our classroom routines and expectations and I am already amazed by the growth I am seeing, academically and socially!

Our literacy time is focused on learning what it means to be a good reader and practicing how to take care of books. We have learned many letters as a part of the Fundations program, including: t, b, f, n, m, c, a, i, and r. We practice these letters each day, learning what they are called, a special word to help us remember the letter, and the sound each letter makes. We also practice proper formation of the letter using our special lines: the "sky line," the "plane line," the "grass line," and the "worm line." Ask your child what these lines are and how to form some of the letters we have learned! Also during literacy, we are practicing recognizing and producing rhymes, as well as syllabication.

Math is a well-loved time of our day, with children often asking how long until we will begin this block! The children especially love the math workstations that we use. These workstations offer children a chance to explore with math manipulatives and practice the concepts that we have learned about with a number of games and activities. Some of current math workstations are: Pattern Blocks, Geoboard Shapes, Bucket of Bugs, Unifix Cube Patterns, Polydrons, and Which Bug Will Win?

Also during math, we have spent time making a class quilt. Our "Shoo Fly Quilt" is hanging outside our classroom if you would like to come and take a look. We used triangles to create the quilt squares and then discussed the patterns that we noticed. Please enjoy this photo of our beautiful creation!


Here are some of the observations that the children made about our quilt:

“It’s in a pattern. It goes orange on the inside, green on the inside.”

~ Aidan

“It’s like stairs. Orange, orange, orange.” ~ Shaunna

“The stairs are diagonal." ~ Sam

“It’s a pattern on each row.” ~ Mario

“There’s different rows and different colors and I like the pattern a lot.”

~ Connor

“The pattern can go across and upside down. The quilt is a rectangle.”

~Thomas G.

“The orange triangles are touching in a special way.”

~ Calder

“It’s like an elevator. It goes up and down.”

~ Nolan

“I noticed if you turn your head a little, you see a square.” ~ Sophia

“We made our quilt squares with triangles. Some look like upside down triangles.” ~ Desiree

We have also spent a great deal of time sorting objects be one or more attributes. We started exploring this concept using shapes and recently moved to sorting bugs by a characteristic. Here is a photo of the poster that we created when we sorted bugs into groups of bugs with spots and bugs with no spots.

Thursday we were able to visit the Hinesburg Fire Station to celebrate Fire Safety Week. We had a wonderful time exploring the fire trucks, meeting the firefighters, and learning about how to stay safe if we are ever in a fire.

On Friday, we took a top secret trip to peek in the windows of our new classroom! The room is looking wonderful and should be ready any day now! The children were impressed to see a sink and our very own bathroom attached to the classroom! We are so excited to move into our new space and make it our own.

Next week we will be learning about colors and will complete many fun activities to do so. Please help your child dress for the special "Color of the Day." They are as follows:

Monday 10/11: RED Day
Tuesday 10/12: ORANGE Day
Wednesday 10/13: YELLOW Day
Thursday 10/14: GREEN Day
Friday 10/15: BLUE Day
Monday 10/18: PURPLE Day
Tuesday 10/19: BROWN Day
Wednesday 10/20: BLACK Day

Please check back for photos and descriptions of all of the fun things we do to learn about colors!

Shelfari

I enocurage you to take a look at the bottom, right-hand corner of my blog. Here, you will find my Shelfari Book Shelf. This is an online tool that I have added to my blog to showcase some of the books that we are reading in the classroom. Some of the books are our story bit books, some are read alouds that support our social science themes, and some are just my personal favorites that I enjoy sharing with the class! If you would like, you can sign these books out of the school or town library to share them again with your children. Remember: you can never hear a good book too many times! Happy reading!