Hello Families,

Congratulations! We have finished the iReady diagnostic test. Soon, your child will be able to practice iReady lessons at home and in school. Look for iReady homework information to come home soon.

Please remember to read the poetry book over the weekend and return it on Monday!

On Friday we sent home new heart words and the heart words I sent home earlier this year. This is our class’s spelling words.  The heart words stay at home. Please practice reading and writing these words. We will also be learning these words in class.

Progress reports will go home by the end of October. The progress report is not the report card or a permanent grade. I wanted to inform you how your child is currently doing in school.  I want to let you know, when there is time to change, instead of when you receive the first report card at the December’s conferences.  Many families ask how their child can grow in reading and writing.  To do better in reading and writing your student has to practice at home. Soon, I will send home books that your child read at school.  Our kindergarteners should be read to every night for 20 minutes. If you have any questions or concerns, please email Ms. Eiden or Mr. Eubanks.

Halloween Party and Field Trip: The field trip money and forms are due on Monday.  I have contacted the four volunteers for this field trip, due to space we are not able to take many volunteers.  If you volunteered and were not chosen, I will pick you first for the November Outdoor Center Field Trip.  The Field Trip to the Nursing Home will be our Halloween Party too.  We will not be doing a big party after the field trip.  Remember dismissal on Halloween is 12:09. I will be sure to take many pictures!

Reading– Our next week’s theme will be all about pumpkins. This week we will start our pumpkin study. We will learn how a pumpkin grows and ways to describe a pumpkin.  We are now labeling and writing a story across several pages. On Friday, I sent home your students’ old writing samples. You can keep this work at home and watch how your child will grow as a writer.  On Friday we also took a writing assessment. Each kindergarten class performs the same assessment in the same manner. The assessments are designed to provide information about how students are doing and what we need to teach.

Science-  We began our first science unit by exploring each sense.  Students had fun exploring touch, taste, feel, seeing and hearing stations.  We learned that all scientist “observe” what is around them.  Next, we looked closely at our eyes and learned about how our eyes work and what people do if they cannot see. Now we are learning how sorting can help us as a scientist. During the middle of the science centers, there was a fire drill.  We talked about what scenes we would use if there was a fire.  The picture up top is us lining up for the fire drill.

Social Studies-We talked about rules and what would happen if we did not have any rules. We also talked about the rules we should have in our classroom and how they are different than the laws that we have in the country.

Math- Games are an integral part of the Everyday Mathematics curriculum. They provide a fun way for students to build strong arithmetic skills and fact power, including mental math and computation skills with whole numbers, fractions, and decimals.  Students learned how to play Top-it.

The objective of the game is to win all cards.

The deck is divided evenly among the players, giving each a down stack. In unison, each player reveals the top card of their deck – this is a “battle” – and the player with the higher card takes both of the cards played and moves them to their stack.

Phonics: We are studying syllables or parts of words. Students who have well-developed phonological skills learn to read with more success. These abilities are important in learning about the language and provide the foundation for learning the sound-print connection. An effective reading program includes many components, including syllable awareness. Next week we will learn how about onset and rime. The “onset” is the initial phonological unit of any word (e.g. c in cat) and the term “rime” refers to the string of letters that follow, usually a vowel and final consonants (e.g. at in cat). Not all words have onsets. Similar to teaching beginning readers about rhyme, teaching children about onset and rime helps them recognize common chunks within words. This can help students decode new words when reading and spell words when writing.

Why Teach Onset and Rime?

• They help children learn about word families, which can lay the foundation for future spelling strategies
• Teaching children to attend to onset and rime will have a positive effect on their literacy skills
• Learning these components of phonological awareness is strongly predictive of reading and spelling acquisition

The 5 Sence Centers in Pictures