I sincerely hope you all had a restful, peaceful, and fun filled winter break. It is always good to get 2 weeks to relax and spend time with your family and friends. My family was busy attending wrestling events of course, but we did read, watch some movies, and go out to dinner a few times. It was so nice to be able to eat out at some of the restaurants I received gift cards from (THANK YOU) and also spend my very generous gift card to downtown Naperville. I thank you again for all the generosity and thoughtfulness that was bestowed upon me this holiday season. I truly appreciate your kindness!
January brings BIG changes in Kindergarten. The children seem to return from break more mature and ready to take on the challenge of becoming prepared for first grade.During the first few weeks back we will spend a good amount of time assessing the children as we prepare for report cards and begin to change up our flex groups. Each child will be assessed for their 2nd quarter math skills as well as on our Kindergarten sight words. Students will also take our winter CBM tests. In order to do these assessments, the children may be doing more seat work or independent reading/writing for a few days. But once we get our new scores, it will be full speed ahead! When we pull all this information together, we will look at what your child's needs are. We will place them in a flex group that works on the skills they need to build upon or that provides them with enrichment. We will also begin to differentiate within the classroom more during centers and writers workshop. We strive to provide the very best education for each and every one of our May Watts kids.
Our letter of the week for next week will be letter G. We will read books by Julia Donaldson and do some prediciting, and recalling of details. Students will also work on retelling a story with a beginning, middle, and end. At the end of the week, they will bring home the characters from the story The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Your child should retell the story to you using the stick puppets. It is important for them to be able to tell the story in order, but not important to tell you EVERYTHING that happened. They should focus on the main ideas and mention the characters, setting, problem and solution. Being able to tell a story orally will help them to transition to writing stories with a beginning, middle, and end during Writer's Workshop.
In math we will be comparing shapes when we talk about sides, angles, and corners. The class will consider the attributes of shapes when we play a new shape game. We will also be introduced to the subtraction symbol while we work on simple subtraction problems. Students will learn about the calculator and how to do simple problems on it. It will be a fun week.
Just a reminder about winter recess. We do TRY and go out every day that it is above 5. Students need to dress for the weather. It is helpful if you label your children's hats and gloves. Everyday I have a HUGE pile of unclaimed items on my classroom floor! Most of the children can get dressed by themselves and that saves me a lot of time so thank you for working on that at home.
Learning centers started this week. The dates we have learning centers are on the sign up genius link on the side of the blog. We need volunteers to help. If you can donate some time to our class, we would really appreciate it! Remember to keep track of your child's reading this month too. The reading incentive for the month is a ticket to Great America. You can count minutes that you read TO your child as well as them reading independently. Book orders came home on Friday. Check out the handouts...there are some cool books available!
