Can you believe that kindergarten is almost over? This can be a tough time of the year for students because they begin to realize that they will be in a different class and they will not be with the same students next year. Different students can take this in many ways. Some students might act out, others will become sad and others it will not affect at all. If your child is acting differently, you might want to talk to him/her about next school year.

Please send in your $4 for the Naturalist. It is a very cool, in-school field trip. West Bloomfield parks brings in live animals. It is a hit every year!

I sent a note home on Wednesday, explaining that the iReady test starts next week. Also next week we are taking a math test.

Next year’s placement

This time of the year many families become worried about next year’s placement. I would like to inform you how the process works. The kindergarten teachers put the students into classroom groups based on many different criteria including: reading, math, writing scores and gender. The teacher of the group is then chosen by Mr. Maktari. In August families will be informed about who their first grade teacher will be. I also do not know the final placement of students and teachers until August. I cannot take request for certain teachers or placing students together.

Phonics-

We studied suffixes and focused on the -ful & -less ending of words. This week we are reviewing everything for the test. I did not send home heart words this week. We have completed our study of all the heart words. Now we are just reviewing them.

Social Studies-

This week’s theme was “Economics” we learned about the producer, consumer, goods and services, wants and needs.

Science-

Last week’s theme was rocks. We finished up our science unit by collecting, sorting and comparing different rocks. We wrote rock reports and put them in our Science Notebook. We also compared sand to soil and learned why plants need soil and sunlight.

Writing

We have continued to work on persuasive writing. We wrote and published a letter about a problem we see everyday. After we finished our letters we worked in groups to and made signs and petitions on ways to change the world.

Math

Last week we studied graphing. This includes how to take a survey and reading information from a graph. We continued to study story problems and addition and subtraction. At the end of the week students also learned about in/out boxes.

At times, students figure out the rule. Other times students apply the rule and figure out what number goes in the :”In” column or the number that goes into the “Out” column.

This week we have been working on place value with base 10 blocks.