Happy Mother’s Day! I hope you enjoyed all the gifts we worked hard on completing this week. I think the student’s artwork we did in class turned out amazingly!
This week’s theme: This week, we are learning about Maps. I sent home Map homework earlier in the week, and you can return it whenever your child finishes it.
Poetry: Make sure you keep sending your child’s poetry notebook back to school. A friendly reminder that your child should read some of the poems to you and return them on Mondays.
Placement: This time of the year, many families become worried about next year’s placement into first grade. The kindergarten teachers put the students into classroom groups based on many different criteria, including reading, math, writing scores, and gender. Mr. Maktari then chooses the teacher. In August, you will be able to check Skyward, and it will inform families about who their first-grade teacher will be. I also do not know the final placement of students until August.
iReady: we will begin testing next week. Please keep on practicing this week.
Spelling: Unit 2 words Spelling test will take place on Friday.
MONDAY ONLY- $5 for a book from the vending machine. I am sorry, I can only have students buy books on Monday.
Reading: We are starting a new Reading Unit. During this unit, we will be creating a community of avid readers who read together, share their favorite books, and talk about books all the time! We will be diving into fiction stories and learning deeply about characters, settings, and plots. Kids will also be organizing “reading playdates” to invent fun literacy-related things to do with their friends and spending MORE time reading in class. During this time, it is not about how many books you read, but how deeply you read them. What connections are you making with the story-line or the characters? How do you think the characters are feeling, and has that changed throughout the book?
Writing: We are diving into the unit of persuasive writing. Persuasive writing in Kindergarten? Can you believe it! I definitely can. These kids have a lot to say when making our classroom, school, community, and world a better place.
In persuasive writing, we start by noticing or seeing a problem around us that involves more than just ourselves. We then have to think of a possible solution. This part is more complicated than it sounds! A lot of students are drawn to the resolution of “just stop.” We all know that “just stopping” something is a lot easier said than done. We have been working together to think of complex and require a little more effort from everyone involved. The last step is to think about who you are going to write to and how you will persuade them of your solution through writing.
This can look like a book read to the whole class, a letter to Ms. Jesse, a petition calling people to help, an announcement at Monday Morning Meeting, etc. I can’t wait to see what changes come about because of our writing!! What a great tie-in to our next project, “How can we use our creativity to help?”
Some of the problems that have come up so far are:
– littering
– pushing on the playground
– running in the hallway
– friends not being kind
Math: It’s that time of year…
We are working on knowing our addition and subtraction facts to 10 in a snap! These are facts that we want to know so well that we don’t need to use our fingers for help! We also want to know how to write and solve these facts in many different ways. We will be practicing these skills through simple dice games and diving into the world of STORY PROBLEMS.
When I think about being a kid and having to solve story problems, I cringe. I never knew what the problem was asking me, and I ended up just pulling the numbers out of the sentences and either adding them together or subtracting to come up with some answer. Starting with small numbers and teaching the different types of story problems in Kindergarten will allow everyone to truly understand the different kinds of problems and write a number sentence that matches each problem type.