1. November 4, 2016
Dear Parents,
It has been a very busy two weeks in Kindergarten! We enjoyed going to our very first Book Fair and choosing books to purchase. We also enjoyed celebrating Halloween at Washington School. We loved seeing each other’s costumes, parading through the first and second grade classrooms, making pumpkin patch pudding treats, lollipop ghosts, and playing Pin the Nose on the Skeleton at our Halloween party, and joining in the school-wide parade on the field. We had fun matching upper and lowercase letters to make skeletons, creating eight-legged spider headbands, and investigating pumpkins.
We deepened our understanding of rhyming by sorting words that rhyme with the headers nose, head, leg, and hair. We enjoyed finding the rhyming words in the text I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More and participating in the rhyming names activity, Willoughby Walloughby Woo by substituting the initial consonant W for other consonants. We began our in-depth focus of letter/sound association by sorting initial and final /Bb/ and /Ww/ and participating in several multi-sensory activities, including tracing the letters in sand trays and on bumpy mats. We highlighted the sight words look, see, on, do, an at, that, and big in the shared reading texts, Orange and An Orange Pumpkin, and added them to our Word Wall and word rings. We completed reading the Star Book Harry By the Sea and began reading The Carrot Seed. We are having great fun using character voices as we read along with the text! We grew our thinking by discussing new vocabulary, as well as identifying characters, character traits, setting, problem, and solution.
In Writing Workshop, we celebrated our accomplishments as authors by reading our All About books to the class, reflecting on what each classmate did well as a writer, and offering sincere compliments to each writer. We presented our beautiful writing folder collages to the class and practiced oral storytelling by choosing a picture to tell a story about. We learned that we have amazing true personal stories to tell! In Reading Workshop, we focused on “reading” the pages of our star books and developing story language by following the actions of the characters, imagining how the characters feel and making our voices match, including what the characters are saying, and connecting the pages of the story by using the connecting words “And then,” ”So,” ”But,” ”Suddenly,” or “All of a sudden.”
In Math, we enjoyed using marbles to build numbers in our individual ten-frames and are getting stronger at describing what the number looks like, ie. 5 is 5 marbles across the top, 8 is five on the top and 3 on the bottom, etc. We are also getting stronger at recognizing how many more are needed to make a ten by quickly looking at the empty spaces. We had great fun playing the math games Boo Bump and Race to the Finish Line!

2. Looking Ahead: Special Notes:
In Science, we continued our discussion of trees by reading the text Be a Friend to Trees and discovering all the things that trees give or do for people and animals. We also read several texts about pumpkins. We learned about the life cycle of a pumpkin and created a special project to sequence the steps. We investigated our class pumpkin and by estimating and measuring its height and weight, counting its number of ribs, examining the blossom end, where it lay on its side to grow, and where it was removed from the vine and recorded our findings in our pumpkin journals. We also predicted whether it would float or sink when placed in water. We were so surprised to learn that it floats!
During our classroom Maker Monday explorations, the children pursued their natural talents and interests by choosing to explore open and closed circuits with Squishy Circuits,
following a plan to engineer a spinning machine or moveable robot using Goldie Blox, or
follow patterns and/or design original patterns using pattern blocks. What fun!
Wishing you a beautiful weekend,
Linda Yelvington
Looking Ahead:
Parent/Teacher Conferences: Mon., Nov. 7- Schools Closed for Students
Conferences from 1 p.m. -8 p.m.
Tues., Nov. 8- Minimum Day for Students
Conferences from 1:40 – 3:40
Wed., Nov. 9- Minimum Day for Students
Conferences from 1:40 - 3:40
NJEA Convention: Schools Closed – Thursday Nov. 10 & Friday, Nov. 11
Special Notes:
Thank you for all the fantastic books donated to our classroom library from the Book Fair. Your generosity and thoughtfulness are greatly appreciated!
Thank you to our class parents and the parent volunteers who helped plan, organize, and assist the children at our Halloween party. The children had a wonderful time!
Please help your child practice reading, spelling, and using their sight words in sentences. Also, please be sure to assist your child as they read their Star Books with a storyteller’s voice.