Hello Families!
Your children made it through an entire week of school last week! That's a lot! And they were seriously fantastic. Here comes another full week of getting to know each other, getting comfortable in school and creating a community in our classroom. So here is the news...
CLASS BREAKFAST: So that you all have a chance to get to know each other, we will have a breakfast in our classroom this FRIDAY, SEPT. 20th, from 8:20 - 8:50. I will put up a sign up sheet outside the classroom so you can sign up to bring something (things like coffee, bagels, etc..) Yay!
WATER ETC.: Avery's mom, Elizabeth has offered to take charge of our classroom water. I think she will be letting you know how you can donate funds for the delivery. And the decision about how to drink water is that everybody will bring a water bottle. I'm working on figuring out where to store these bottles inside the classroom during the day (best not to have kids going into the hallway to retrieve them) but for now let's put them on the sand table right inside the classroom door. So thank you Elizabeth and thank you all!
STILL COLLECTING FAMILY PHOTOS: Remember - if you don't have a photo of the full family, you can always collage one together (not too big please) - you know, cut out a head from another photo and glue it on to an almost complete photo! It works! The idea is to get up your photo so your child can always see you and understand there is a connection between home and school. It's comforting and lovely.
SPECIAL DAYS vs. STAR NAME: Just in case your child is coming home telling you they need to have their Special Day now - I wanted to clarify the difference and why there may be confusion. Special Days happen throughout the year. We already had 2 last week because there happened to be 2 birthdays. Star Name is something I do through our phonics study and every child will have a Star Name Day within the next 6 weeks. Hope that makes sense - I just had a vision of kids coming home all pumped up yelling, "When is my Special Day???"
FOUND THINGS: I collect the following recycled items for art work
Wine corks
apple sauce pouch/yogurt pouch twist off tops
old keys
any interesting/colorful/clean knick knacks that would be suitable for art work
WHAT WE ARE UP TO:
We are, of course, still getting to know each other and our surroundings. We are learning the routines of Morning Meeting, learning different greetings, learning each others' names and ultimately getting comfortable in school. This week we will talk about our Hopes and Dreams for kindergarten and use these as our foundation for creating our class agreement or class rules. We will be reading the book, David Goes to School, without reading the text and only reading the pictures in order to notice and discuss what David is doing that's a problem. Then we will be creating an alternate book where instead of pictures of problematic behavior, we will be drawing pictures of "yes" behaviors - what he should be doing. The next day we will build on that by role playing some other possible problems that sometimes come up in our school lives and charting those. Then for Day 3 we will be sorting problems and solutions into 3 groups - Ourselves, Others, and our Classroom. After all of this rich work, we will decide on our class rules which I will then share with you!
Last week we discovered that we are already readers and writers! Some of us can read words and all of us can read signs! Some of us can write words, letters, and all of us can write using our drawings! We're off to a great start. We will continue with the launching lessons in our Readers and Writers workshops this week. We are also doing our extremely exciting Star Name phonics work!
We've been exploring our math manipulatives (the tools we use to help us do math.) This week we will be learning that the last number you say or land on when counting is the total. We had a discussion as part of our "Ourselves and Others" social study about the similarities and differences with how we get to school most days. The kids drew on a card and we created a graph. This week we will be using the graph to learn about totals. We will also be using attendance - specifically an attendance stick - to do this math work. We have also started to have Number Talks and are using the counting of the days we've been in school on a 10 frame to introduce the concept of using different math strategies to count.
Last week we worked on self portraits. We focused first on the parts of our face, the shapes and after looking closely in mirrors, drew the outline of our portraits. Then in the following days we focused on all of the different colors and shades of our faces, our hair, our eyes. We looked closely again and tried to match approximate colors to copies of those same outline portraits. I will have those up for you to enjoy this week. The unit of Ourselves and Others goes way beyond our physical attributes. We will be discovering that we have many things in common and that our differences make for a beautiful and more interesting world. This week we will be reading some books to support this work, including Same, Same But Different by, Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw. We've also been having Worktime every day. This is a time for playing. "Children learn as they play. More importantly, in play, children learn how to learn." O. Fred Donaldson. In other words, this is where our most important and developmentally appropriate learning takes place. Our play is extremely purposeful and meaningful. Along with other social/emotional and academic learning during Worktime, we will also have a "Worktime Word of the Week." I will be teaching directly into concepts such as empathy, compromise, sharing, inclusion, flexibility - and many others.
Are your kids singing This Land is Your Land? Keep on the Sunny Side? Country Roads? The Lion Sleeps Tonight? Are they spontaneously busting into The Chicken Dance? These are our songs and this week we will continue learning these and probably a couple new ones.
Have a great week! Love, Lynn