Art and Feelings...

Last Friday and this past Monday the children worked with Ms. Marissa, our school-based counselor, to discuss feelings.  We discussed how specific colors relate to our feelings.  The children then worked on creating a painting using various colors and how we feel!  We used paint and showed how your feelings can take over another feeling.  The children had a blast!

Graduation...

We will be having our kindergarten celebration the last week of school!  We will have the celebration show on June 3rd and June 6th at 9:30 in the morning.  Once the show is over the children have the opportunity to continue to celebrate with their families.  On June 4th and June 5th we will be having Field Day.  The children will be able to participate in various activities.  We will also have some other fun kindergarten activities!

Learning...

The end of school is fast approaching, but we are still learning and working hard in the classroom.  We just completed Unit 5 of Reading Street and will be moving into Unit 6.  This particular unit has a lot of review and preparation for 1st grade.  We will begin to review all sight words learned this year.  We will be assessing all the sight words and your child needs to know all the words to receive a P on their report card.  Many children are doing well; however, the words "where, what, come, was" are words which the children confuse often.  The unit theme is building and we will be delving into the question "What are different ways of building?" and we will be reading "Building with Dad."

We have been working on DIBELS this past week and will continue this coming week.  We will send home results once we have all children tested and the results are placed in the computer system.  We will try our best to send home results during the week of May 20th.  After reviewing some of the results, we are very pleased.  We want to thank you for your help at home.  Please continue to practice letters, sound, and just reading for fun!

We have been working hard on story writing in our writing time.  The children are doing a great job developing a story with a beginning, middle, and end.  Some children have written non-fiction pieces about plants and some have written narrative stories about themselves.  We want all children to be able to write a simple story with a beginning, middle, and end.  We are encouraging some children to be developing stories with 2 sentences on each page.  We are also looking for capital letters, punctuation, and spacing.

Mom...

We're Still Moving On...

This week we will be learning a lot in kindergarten.  We will be completing Unit 5 in Reading Street.  We will be reading "This is the Way We Go to School."  We will be working on the comprehension skill drawing conclusions.  We will culminate the unit by going back to the big question "How do people get from here to there?"  We will pull all of our knowledge from Unit 5 and transportation to answer this particular question.  I hope the children have been coming home telling you about their learning in Reading Street and I hope you have seen improvement in their comprehension ability.  We will be assessing letter formation, spacing, punctuation, capital letters, and spelling.  When we assess for spelling we are looking to see if the children write what they hear; therefore, if a child was trying to write the word "monkey" we would expect the child to possibly write "muke."  We are currently still working on our sight words: where and come.  Please continue to work on these words.  In addition, we will be sending home a list of all sight words which should be mastered by the end of Kindergarten.  The words on the list are words we have been working on all year.  Your child should know these words in less than 3 seconds and should not try to sound them out.  Also, we are working on letter naming fluency (speed), letter sounds, and segmentation.  We will be sending home a new practice sheet this week.  We have our DIBELS assessment beginning next week; therefore, we want the children to do the best they can!

Planting a Garden...

Today we started a garden. Our class planted flower seeds and Mrs. Franz's class planted vegetable seeds! The children had a blast and we look forward to watching them grow. At the end of the year we will move them outside and plant them around the school!

"A" Class Short Vowel Song...

Here are the children from the "A" class singing Miles and Tanny McGregor's short vowel song!