Newsletter - Week of September 5th

DATES TO REMEMBER:

-Friday, September 8th—Book Orders Due

-Tuesday, September 12th—K-2 Picture Day

-Monday, September 18th—Delayed Start

We had a busy first week getting to know each other and beginning to establish our classroom routines. It will take a few weeks to get the routines down, but this group is doing a fantastic job! Thursday was an especially busy day as we chased the Gingerbread Man all around the school. We visited many places and met several important people who work at our school. We finally found our Gingerbread Man back in our classroom and we quickly gobbled him up before he could run away again. The students were very excited; I hope you had a chance to hear about it.

STUDENT OF THE WEEK: 

Our student of the week is Kyran Boersma. Kyran is ‘bubbly’ & kind and loves building & creating with Legos. A couple of his favorite movies are Minions & Paw Patrol and he enjoys eating hot dogs & chicken nuggets.  One goal Kyran has for this year is to work on being more patient, which is a great goal for us all. Congratulations to Kyran on being our Student of the Week!

READING:

The next 3 weeks we will be focusing on learning our letters by studying the letters in our names; we will also introduce 2 letters each day and do several activities with the focus letters. Once we’ve made it through the entire alphabet, we will then start an in-depth study of each letter, spending a week on each letter.  This week our reading lessons will  focus on the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, & H. We will also introduce our first sightword—I.  We will spend time learning the parts of a book and practice tracking print from left to right, as we read and recite familiar nursery rhymes.

BOOK BOXES:

We will begin reading our own books from home by the end of this week—so please bring in your 5-8 books if you still need to.  We will learn 3 ways to read a book—reading by looking at the pictures, retelling a familiar story from memory, & reading the words. Our goal is that students will begin seeing themselves as ‘readers.’

WRITING:

This week we will complete a couple journals about ourselves—a self-portrait, what we like to do at school, and our friends at school. Students will be practicing writing their names, handwriting the letters A-H, and writing simple sentences using the sightword I. When practicing writing your child’s name with them at home, please be sure to begin with an uppercase letter and use lowercase for the rest of their name.  Also, when forming our letters, we always stress starting our letters at the top:)

MATH: 

This week we will go on a Number Hunt, looking for numbers around our classroom and the school. We will be learning how to write and represent the numbers 0 & 1. We will also practice counting items using one-to-one correspondence.

SCIENCE & SOCIAL STUDIES:

This week we will continue to read many books about starting school and what it means to be a ‘good friend.’  We will also learn about the American Flag and learn the Pledge of Allegiance. In Science, we will  begin our unit on Living and Non-Living things; our Monarch caterpillars are now safe inside their chrysalises and we will be watching and waiting for them to emerge as butterflies.