Newsletter Updates for the Week of November 7th

DATES TO REMEMBER:
-Thursday, Nov 10th—No School—Conferences
-Monday, Nov 14th—Delayed Start
-Tuesday, Nov 15th—No School—Deer Day
-November 24th & 25th—Thanksgiving Break

STUDENT OF THE WEEK: Our student of the week is Taylor Agar. Taylor loves to color and draw and she enjoys watching movies and playing with her Barbies. Her favorite place to eat is Duane’s Restaurant and when she grows up she wants to get married and be a mom. Congratulations to Taylor on being Student of the Week!!

REPORT CARDS & CONFERENCES:
I’m planning to send report cards home on Tuesday of this week so that you will have time to look them over before our conference. We will have an opportunity to discuss your child’s strengths and challenges and talk about things we can do both at home and at school to strengthen their skills. I will also have sign up sheets for our Thanksgiving Celebration, Christmas Party, and Valentine’s Party. In addition, you’ll have an opportunity to read a few of our class books that we’ve authored and illustrated and see some pictures of our year so far. I’m looking forward to meeting with you on Thursday!

READING: We will finish up with the letter Bb this week and begin our new letter: Ss. Our sightwords for the next couple of weeks are: can, at, am, & see. Later this week, we will be reading Growing Vegetable Soup as we work on vocabulary, comprehension, and predicting. We will also be reading several books about Scarecrows to correspond with the letter S. Over the next couple of weeks we will be introducing the CAFÉ menu board for Reading and learn about our first 2 Comprehension Strategies for Reading: 1) Spinner Spider—reminds us to make connections as we are reading & 2) Picturing Penguin—reminds us to make a picture in our mind as we are reading. We will be practicing both of these strategies so that students are confident with using them independently when we start book boxes in a couple of weeks.

WRITING: This week we will introduce ‘Writing Folders’ as students will be using them to write about their families. We will reinforce that names always begin with an uppercase letter. We will also introduce the FCA that reminds us that our pictures and words should always match. In their journals, students will write about bats and how to be a good friend to others. We will also practice using Picturing Penguin while reading the book My Many Colored Days and then write about what color our day is on Friday.

SCIENCE/SOCIAL STUDIES: This week we will read a few more books about bats and complete our KWL chart. We will also be comparing bats and birds to see how they are alike and how they are different. With the opening of deer season right around the corner, we will be talking about Gun Safety this week. We will meet Eddie Eagle who teaches children what to do if they ever find a gun lying around: Stop, Don’t Touch, Leave the Area, Tell An Adult! We will also discuss what it means to ‘vote’ and practice exercising our democratic ‘right to vote’ by voting for a special snack and then graphing the results.

MATH: This week we will sort buttons a variety of ways and practice ordering the numbers 1-10. We will also be working on identifying ordinal positions (first, second, third . . . ). Please continue to practice counting at home, those teens are tricky and it’s easy to skip over some of the numbers, also transitioning from 29-30, 39-40, etc. is difficult for many kindergartners.