Hello Again! Hello Again!

I hope this finds you all well and settling into our fall together! I know that there is much to do both in our classroom and at home! We can do it! Team Kinder is ready to roll!

In our ELA you will see that we are starting to work on our reading skills. I have been talking to the kids about looking carefully at pictures first and then reading the words they may know (or that repeat) and connecting what they know about the picture to what words might be (using first sounds at clues). We are also working on labeling our pictures to turn into writing. Two letter words and short vowels sounds are my main focus for them right now. Many two letter words quickly translate into Word Families. As an example the word “am” quickly turns into ham, dam, lamb. Then when we make a short vowel substitution we can change that to him, dim and limb. We are also looking at the shape of words: short letters, tall letters and brave “under the bottom lava line” letters. We are using their own names to work on this concept. Looking at four letter names and their shapes: Neil, Lola, Gigi, Finn, Gwen as examples.

In Math we continue to work on reading and writing our numbers 0-10 and working up to 0-20. Mastery of number order will be very important for addition and subtraction in future months.

October has brought us to The Rosary in Religion. This is a very important month where we are not only working on our prayers and the concept of the Rosary as a tool BUT the timeline of Jesus’ life! This is huge! We talked and colored and prayed the Joyful Mysteries last week. This week we will focus on the Luminous Mysteries. These are the stories about Jesus’ ministry/adulthood. These were added around 2002, so you may not have grown-up with them in your own practice.

I was just telling the amazing Mrs. A that I am a big believer in blank paper. You will see that the kids are drawing and labeling and counting on blank paper. This is an important assessment of their abilities. It is one thing to follow along on a worksheet but it is another to produce your own ideas on a blank paper!

Field Trip!!!! Thursday, October 20th! I hope that you received the email from our Room Moms’ AND that you saw the paperwork in your students’ Green Go Home Folder! We need to have all paperwork and $10 cash ASAP. All parents/adults planning to drive or attend will need to be cleared by the office. We can NOT have younger siblings at the patch. This is a school trip and a special time for just the Kinder. Please also note that we will be dismissing at 2:00 from Aldrich Park that day!

Folders: Green Go Home Folder carries papers to and from school during the week. Blue Homework Folders will come home on Mondays and are due back Friday. Red Stop Folders stay in the students’ desks. It is a place for them to stop and put papers that they want to keep working on. Weekly I go through the red folders and try to sort what to keep, trash and turn in. Students are learning how to keep and manage their own desks and supplies.

Homework will be going home now most every week. This is what the school expects of Kinder. I am to send homework that they can do a little each night. Some parents choose to do more or less depending on their family’s schedule. Homework is recorded, corrected and accounted for in their grades. There will be work in ELA and Math nightly. I keep notes and pages as evidence for conferences and grading.

THIS WEEK:

Monday: PE

Tuesday: Music

Wednesday: PE

Thursday: Art after lunch

Friday: Library. October Birthday Free Dress, Noon Dismissal (Faculty Meetings)