Newsletter Updates for the Week of January 23rd

DATES TO REMEMBER:
-Friday, January 27—Library
-Friday, January 27—Report Cards Sent Home
-Friday, January 27—Book Orders Due
-Friday, February 3—Smokey the Bear Visits (10:00)

SLEDDING PARTY: Even with the cold temperatures, the Sledding Party was a success! Special thanks to Mrs. Bell & Grandma Farr for coming in to help give pushes down the hill and warm us up with hot chocolate!

LIBRARY: Our next visit to the library will be THIS Friday, January 27th. Please be sure to return your child’s library book, so that they can check out a new one.

SMOKEY THE BEAR: Smokey the Bear is coming to visit our classroom on Friday, February 3rd at 10:00. He will be here to talk about Fire Safety/Prevention and the importance of taking good care of our wildlife and natural resources.

REPORT CARDS: Report cards will be coming home this Friday with students. At this point in the school year, Kindergarteners are expected to recognize and name all of their uppercase and lowercase letters and know 80% of their sounds to be at grade level. We have introduced 15 sightwords so far and students who have mastered 80% of those are at grade level. As indicated on the report card, a √ means they ‘meet the standard’ and any areas that your child receives a — or √— are areas that they need to work on. I am always happy to discuss your child’s progress as we won’t have a chance to ‘formally’ meet for conferences until the beginning of March.
**Please note: you will be receiving your child’s DIBELS and AIMSWEB results in a couple of weeks, as they are still finishing up with assessing the students.

READING: This week we will finish up the letter Nn and then start working on the letter Ii. Our sightwords this week are my & we and we will be working with the word chunks: ip, in, it, ick, & ig. Our focus book this week is Ginger and we will work on predicting, comprehension, vocabulary, and determining cause and effect relationships. We will continue to work on blending sounds and segmenting words, rhyming, and retelling The Mitten. This week students will begin picking their own ‘Good-Fit’ books to put in their book boxes for Read-to-Self time—this is a very exciting milestone!

WRITING: This week we will use the book When Sophie Gets Angry to give us ideas for writing about things that make us angry and things that make us happy. We will also do some guided writing activities together so that we can practice starting our sentences with a capital letter, putting spaces between our words, and including an ‘end mark’ at the end of our sentences. We will finish the week with a Type 3 writing where students will write about 3 things to do in Michigan in the Winter. I’ve been very impressed with the students’ growing stamina for writing and their increasing independence for sounding out their words!

SCIENCE/SOCIAL STUDIES: This week we will begin our Social Studies unit: Me on the Map. Students will practice identifying the country, state, and city that they live in using maps and globes.

MATH: This week we will introduce the DIME and practice counting by 10’s. We will also be working on ABB patterning and making a fair trade by trading 10 unit cubes for a rod of 10.

THANK YOU VIDEO: Check out the thank-you video to our School Board Members—you can find it on the McBain homepage—www.mcbain.org. Our class is featured at the end of the video saying our ‘thank-you.’