Newsletter Updates for the Week of December 5th

DATES TO REMEMBER:
-Friday, Dec. 9th—Next visit to the Library
-Friday, Dec. 9th—STAND Strength Assembly
-Monday, Dec. 12th—Delayed Start
-Tuesday, Dec. 20th—Christmas Party
-Wednesday, Dec. 21st—Pajama Day & Sing-a-long with Mr. Smith

STUDENT OF THE WEEK:
Our student of the week is Kaden Abrahamson. Kaden enjoys playing a variety of sports: basketball, football, baseball, and soccer and he can usually be seen wearing a jersey from one of his favorite teams. Kaden’s favorite place to go is the beach and he aspires to be a football player when he grows up.
Congratulations to Kaden on being student of the week!


RETURN REMINDERS:
Please remember to return these items:
*Completed November Book-it Calendars
*Library Books
*Completed Yellow Student Release Forms

STAND STRENGTH TEAM ASSEMBLY:
The STAND Strength Team will be visiting our school this Friday, December 9th. They will bring an important message to our students regarding self-esteem, teamwork, and bullying. The assembly begins at 9:00 in the Middle School Gym if you'd like to join us.

WRITING:
This week we will use our senses to identify
details that we can include in our writing. We will also work on sequencing the story Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? And use Eric Carle’s brilliant idea to create our own class book titled: Children, Children, What Do You See? On Thursday, we will be completing a Type 3 Writing: What do you see at Christmas time? I’m really encouraging students to try to sound out words while writing and to ‘write the sounds they hear.’

MATH:
This week we will review ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.) We will also begin working on Concepts of Time; we will learn about the parts of a clock, talk about different lengths of time (hour, day, week, month, year) and practice telling time to the hour. This can be quite an abstract concept for Kindergarteners, but we will be working on this throughout the year.

SCIENCE/SOCIAL STUDIES:
This week we will continue our Social Studies Unit on Families and begin our Science Unit on The Five Senses. We will be using our sense of smell to identify different scents as well as our sense of sight to search out details in our environments.


READING:
This week we will be working on the letter Ff as well as the sightwords like & is. We will be reading Follow the Leader as we work on predicting, comprehension, and vocabulary. We will be introducing 2 new Beanie Baby Accuracy Strategies this week: Eagle Eyes & Lips the Fish. When we come to a word that we don’t know, we can use our Eagle Eyes to check the pictures for clues. Since pictures match the words, looking at the pictures can help us figure out a word we don’t know. We can also look at the first letter of the word and get our lips ready to say the sound using Lips the Fish. We are trying to get a few strategies in our ‘tool kit’ before we begin reading from our Book Boxes next week. We will have another full week of literacy stations; students will be busy sequencing and retelling stories, working on the letter F, rhyming, and sightwords, as well as handwriting Christmas lists. During strategy groups, students will practice using Eagle Eye & Lips the Fish while reading leveled readers, and work on blending individual sounds into words.