Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you had a wonderful time with your family. This time of the year gets pretty busy. In January, kindergarten takes off, the curriculum becomes harder, and students are more use to the school environment. It is an exciting time.
As the holiday season begins, we will be learning about many different celebrations and family traditions. This Friday the Social Studies homework is due so that each student can share about a celebration that is important to your family. It does not have to be a Winter holiday; it can be any holiday at all.
Happy Hanukkah (for those who celebrate it). Sunday is the first night of Hanukkah, and on Monday morning Ms. Rasansky will be coming in and making latkes. Then we will be playing the dreidel game. Also next week we will begin a unit study on the Gingerbread man story and listen to many different versions of this classic tale. When we come back from winter break, we will continue our unit to include many other fairy tales.
Please remember to sign up for conferences on Skyward! If you are having a hard time scheduling a conference on Skyward, email me, and I can put your name in the system. If you cannot meet on December 14th, please email me so we can set up a time to meet and you can hear wonderful things about your child!
THANK YOU! I was nominated by someone (they do not tell me who until later in the year), and I won Teacher of the Year. Thank you. It is an enormous honor.
This week we got a new student! We are excited to have Kadison in our class. Now we have 23 students and two teachers.
Reading
In reading, we are practicing decoding words. There are many ways to read unknown words. We learned about our reading superpowers. Our Reading Superpowers are :
We point to each word.
We think about the book.
We use the pattern to help us read.
We use the words we know to help us read.
We look at the first letter and the picture to help us figure out a word we do not know.
We use all our superpowers at once to read
We use the book’s meaning to help us figure out words.
We can pick just the right books.
Writing
We finished up our unit on pattern books! Throughout this unit, we learned about fur different kinds of pattern books (see anchor chart below). Students became experts and wrote their best pattern book ever this week as their final piece. Every student had the opportunity to read their book as an ending to the unit. We have grown so much as writers through this unit, we are very proud of them!
Math
This week in math we continued to practice with numbers, shapes, and learned a new game called “Monster Squeeze.” This is a game that helps teach students number sense in a fun, interactive way. We showed the students how to go online and play on our classroom math website!
Monster squeeze directions:
The object of the Game To guess the mystery number Directions 1. Player 1 places one monster at each end of the number line, facing each other. The same player chooses a mystery number between 1 and 10 and writes it on a piece of paper. 2. Player 2 guesses a number. 3. Player 1 says whether the number guessed is too low or too high and covers the number with a monster. (The left monster covers the number if the guess was too low. The right monster would cover the number if the guess were too high.) Example: If the mystery number is 6 and the guess is 3, the left-hand monster moves up the number line to cover the 3. If the guess is 8, the right-hand monster moves down the number line to cover the 8. 4. Players keep guessing and moving the monsters until the mystery number is guessed, or “squeezed,” between the monsters!
Check out rivereubanks.com kindergarten websites to play at home!
Last two weeks of Iready winners!
