Kindergarten News

November

        What a busy month!  We have been learning about thanksgiving, we reached the 50^th day of school, and we learned many new songs.  We enjoyed meeting with you last week for parent conferences. As a teacher it is a chance to gain perspective and have purpose in the direction we are headed. We are getting ready for our field trip on Wednesday to the Noah Webster House before a restful Thanksgiving weekend.  In Writer’s Workshop we are drawing pictures to tell stories and stretching out words to add to our pictures.  Soon we will be starting our reading groups. We have been learning lots of quick an easy words in our Song and Poem Books. If you have yours at home send it back as we need them to practice the next month’s poems. In math, we are practicing reading numbers in ten frames, learning position words and working with groups of five .

Table Centers and Job Centers 

          In table centers we are still working on graphing, ordering numbers, tracing patterning and building sentences. When you find fun opportunities to count using the teen numbers take advantage! The more your child hears those numbers used in everyday situations they will be more easily applied.  We still emphasize pride and care in our work. Make sure you are checking your child’s backpack every night, this is a great time to review the job or table center they worked on that day!

Veterans Day

          We Honored our veterans on November 9^th with a beautiful assembly. We heard older students discuss what veterans mean to them and we heard Veterans talk about their experiences in World War II.   We made poppies for Veterans too.

 They were greatly appreciated.

Ask me to sing our November songs…

          Have your child use their reading finger and point to the words as he/she sings one of our favorite November songs.  This will help build literacy skills like word matching and many other concepts of print.  You can ask your child to look for words that begin with a particular sound or try finding some sight words like (the, I, to, in, said, you, and my).  These words we see everywhere! We will send the Song and Poem Books home at the end of the month.

Upcoming Gingerbread Unit

     Our new unit will begin after the Thanksgiving break and continue until the winter recess.  During this unit child will be looking at many versions of the Gingerbread story.  We love this unit as we begin to introduce story elements, Character, setting, events, beginning middle and end. If you have gingerbread stories and would like to share them with the class for the month please send them in with your name on it so we may return it.

On December 20^th we will be having our gingerbread festival.  Please let your class room parent know if you would like to help out with this fun event.

Building Independence

     The weather is cold and students are required to put on more articles of clothing to go outside, please take the time to help your child practice the following self help skills:

• Practice putting on and zipping up their own coats
• Practice putting on their own hats and mittens
• Practice taking their boots on and off
• Practice tying their own shoes

Putting on snow clothes! – It might get to that soon.  Wait a minute it has! Boy oh Boy Oh Boy!  Love that snow! And snow pants! And snow boots!!!  It is time to start thinking about our Give me 5 Bags!   Getting 20+ children dressed for recess is no picnic, so these bags really help. When the snow comes we ask you to send a Give me Five bag. This is a zippered duffel bag.  In this bag you and your child will help put in 2 boots+1 snow pant+ 2 gloves/ mittens = 5 ! If they do not have all five items they may not play in the snow.  I have to tell you that the zippered duffel is really important, I am not being fussy for the sake of being fussy!  Our coat room is very full and it is so important to have things as confined as possible.  It is important that the bags zip so there are no run away boots, or mittens, you know how sneaky those garments can be!  Also the smaller the bag can be the better for all. 

PLEASE CLEARLY LABEL EACH ITEM!!!!!

          Gloves and mittens are easily misplaced. If you have any pairs that you could donate to the classroom our hands would appreciate it.

Germs

 Little kids, little noses… Nose blowing is a difficult task for some kindergarteners.  Please take some time with your child to teach them how to blow their nose properly at school.   Also please review why we don’t pick our nose! We discuss these hygienic issues at school but it never hurts to have reinforcement from home.   We also use hand sanitizer before lunch when we are short on time to wash all of our hands. Donations of hand sanitizer would be greatly appreciated.

Upcoming Kindergarten Events

December 7^th Police officer visit- Stranger Safety

December 12^th Latkes!

December 20^th Gingerbread Festival

December 21 Winter recess. Winter Solstice

Have a beautiful Thanksgiving!