Newsletter Updates for the Week of February 13th

DATES TO REMEMBER:
-Monday, February 20—President’s Day-No School
-Friday, February 24—Progress Reports Home

STUDENT OF THE WEEK: Our student of the week is Mattalyn Canfield. Mattalyn enjoys being outside: riding bikes, climbing trees, riding 4-wheelers, and swinging. Her favorite color is blue and her two favorite places to go are McDonalds and Wal-Mart. When she grows up she would like to be a princess or the Tooth Fairy! In the classroom, we appreciate Mattalyn’s organizational skills; she is always straightening up and packing her friends’ mail. Congratulations to Mattalyn on being student of the week!

SCIENCE/SOCIAL STUDIES: This week we will be reading several books about Friendship & Valentine’s Day. Later in the week, we will begin our
Social Studies Unit on American Symbols and Democratic Values, which will lead us into President’s Day.

MATH: This week we will be doing several math activities in celebration of 100’s Day & Valentine’s Day. We will play several games to practice our addition skills.

READING: This week we will be working on the letter Ll and the sightword what. We will be reading the book Looking for Crabs as we work on predicting, comprehension, vocabulary, & sequencing story events. At stations we will be retelling the story of The Napping House, practice building words, sort foods according to their food groups, work on rhyming, & practice reading and writing our sightwords. We will also be working on counting the number of syllables in words. When we work on syllables, we often use a bouncy ball to reinforce that syllables are ‘how a word bounces out of your mouth.’ Students also practice resting their chins on their hands and counting how many times their chin bounces on their hand. This week we will introduce a new beanie strategy for Accuracy: Skippy the Frog.

WRITING: This week our writing will focus around 100’s Day as we write about what we will look like when we are 100 years old, what we would do with $100. We will continue to discuss and identify ‘Author’s Purpose’ for various books that we read. Towards the end of the week, we will use our imaginations to write about what it would be like to be king/queen for a day.

PROGRESS REPORTS & CONFERENCES: Your child’s progress report will include their DIBELS and AIMSWEB results, which will be sent home on February 24th. Also, winter conferences are scheduled for Thursday, March 1st from 4:00-7:00. The intent of these conferences is to meet with only a few families, those students who we feel need a conference. However, the kindergarten teaching team feels strongly that we’d like to meet with ALL of our families. I’m extending my conference times on the 1st so that I can meet with more families, but I still do not have enough time slots to meet with everyone on this day. Therefore, I will set aside some additional time slots on another day, so that I can meet with each of you. Some of you will receive a conference notice from the office for a time on the 1st and others I will be contacting to schedule an alternative date & time. Winter conferences are not mandatory, but I am committed to giving my time to meet with every family that would like a conference. Please consider being flexible in adjusting your schedule to set aside a time to meet, as I won’t have extra time slots for reschedules and make-ups.