April 28, 2017

Hard to believe the April has come and gone and we are starting May!

We have started our unit on nature this week. We learned about the different parts of a tree this week and will learn about seeds next week. Students painted trees on Monday and labeled the different parts. We also created our May calendar pieces which will focus on different times of the day. We will create Eric Carle inspired flowers next week. We will also learn about life cycles and insects. It is a busy unit but a fun one!

We focused on tapping out words this with the short o sound in the middle. I hope your students read the words to you when they brought their papers home on Monday or Tuesday. That is a great way to practice tapping and reading words.

We have started Writer’s Workshop. Before vacation we brainstormed as a class different ideas we can write about for our personal narratives. Students came up with great ideas such as trips, their families, their birthdays, and their pets. I am excited to see the work that they will come up with.

We finished our math unit on the numbers up to 100. We will continue to work with the numbers up to 100 throughout the rest of the school year.

We started our math unit on shapes.  We will be learning about 2D and 3D shapes. Yesterday we talked about how 2D shapes are flat and 3D shapes are solid.  We went on a shape hunt around the classroom for circles and triangles, and discovered it was easier to find circles in our room then triangles.

Today we read a book called The Greedy Triangle that students really seemed to enjoy. It talks about how the triangle wants to be different shapes, but then end up wanting to be a triangle.

We also made some shapes out of ours friends. We had fun seeing what shapes we could make.

rectangle

square

circle

triangle

We are really working on being independent in class. Following along with the life skills lessons that we worked on with Mrs. Christiansen we are working saying yes when a teacher or friend says their names, following instructions right away without having to repeat the instruction (for example: standing for the pledge, getting snack in the hallway without a teacher watching them, etc), or saying excuse me when they need something from a teacher or a friend. We are working on following directions right away. Students have been working hard.

Keep up the good work with this at home too! Have students put on their jackets by themselves, try and tie their shoes by themselves, etc.

Please continue to practice sight words and math fluency facts at home. In May there is a lot of assessments. I will be checking students on sight words and their fluency facts during this time. The list of the 50 Kindergarten sight words students should know is attached at the top of my blog. Flashcards are a great way to practice. The addition and subtraction fluency facts went home at the end of January. Students should be able to solve these within 3 seconds and without using their fingers. 

A few reminders:

-I will be placing a Scholastic order on Sunday if anyone else would like to order.

-We will go to the library Monday to look at the Spring Book Fair. Feel free to send in money with your child if they found something from the flyer that went home a few weeks ago that they liked. Please be sure to place the money in their folder in a baggie or envelope, labeled with their name. That will be extremely helpful to us to make sure we can keep students’ money straight.

39 more days… Have students mention this to me Monday for a prize!