Newsletter Updates for the Week of October 9th

DATES TO REMEMBER:

-Friday, October 13th—Mobile Dentist, Fire Safety Presentation & Scholastic Book Orders Due

-Monday, October 16th—Delayed Start (10:00)

-Thursday, October 19th—Title 1 Family Night

FAMILY NIGHT:

Our annual Title 1 Family Night will be Thursday, October 19th. Attached to your newsletter you will find your yellow invitation will all of the details. We are asking families to RSVP by October 17th so that we can plan for food. In addition to dinner being served, each teacher will have learning activities set up in their classrooms, as well as handouts and materials for you to take with you to practice important skills at home.  We hope to see you there!

READING: 

This week our reading lessons will focus on the letter Ss and we will introduce a new sightword—see. Our focus stories are Senses at the Seashore and A Feast of the Senses, which we will use to practice building our listening and comprehension skills. We will also introduce Poetry, as we read and listen to some poems related to senses. Our new Beanie Baby for this week is Stretchy Snake—who helps us read new words by stretching out/saying the sounds to figure out the word; we will put this strategy to good use throughout the year while reading and writing.

WRITING: 

This week we will complete a journal about a fire truck and create an Itsy Bitsy Spider class book together. We will also work on writing our own small moment stories—following the writing process of thinking about a story, picturing it in our heads, saying it to ourselves, sketching it on paper, and then adding labels. We are learning that in Kindergarten, we “write the sounds that we hear.” This is hard for some students, as they want me to tell them how to spell words, but as we learn more phonics sounds, the students will become better writers—more independent & more confident.  As they learn more sightwords, they will also add more words that they know how to spell from memory to their repertoire.

SCIENCE & SOCIAL STUDIES:

For Social Studies this week we will focus on Fire Safety and Prevention. We will read several informational texts related to fire safety and watch several video segments to spark our discussions. On Friday, we have a special fire safety presentation brought to us by some local fire fighters and Kindergarten dads.  October is Fire Prevention Month; please be sure to check the batteries in your smoke detectors at home as well as discuss and practice an escape plan with your family.  In Science we will begin learning about our Senses and how important they are in exploring the world around us. We will also read several informational texts about Spiders and learn some interesting facts.

MATH: 

This week we will continue to study the attributes of shapes—focusing on circles, rectangles, & squares. We will also be reviewing five frames and then introduce ten frames. We will continue to work on identifying and writing numbers, as well as oral counting.

VOLUNTEERING: 

Our milk jug jack-o-lanterns are completed; special thanks to Mrs. Johnson for coming in last Friday to help us with that! This Friday, my good friend Grandma Linda will be in to make toilet paper pumpkins with the students.  I’ll soon be working on the November calendar, so if you know a day you’d like to come in and help out in the classroom, please let me know.  The week of Thanksgiving we have several special projects planned for Monday, Tuesday, & Wednesday. Also, I’m looking for parents and grandparents to help with the book fair Nov. 2-3, & 6-10.