On Monday while your children were off enjoying the beautiful weather, the May Watts teachers were spending time sharing some celebrations with our staff. The kindergarten team put some extra focus on math this year. We set a goal in August that ALL our kindergarten students would meet our end of the year CBM math goal. All the K teachers worked hard during our core lessons and while using the math wall to help reach this goal. We taught them how to THINK about math and how to notice math all around them. We engaged in meaningful math talk and discovered the power of learning from our peers. We worked on solving multiple step problems and encouraged our students to take mathematical chances. On Monday we stood proudly in front of the May Watts staff to present our results. We were excited to announce that ALL of our students made progress in math!!!!! We ended the year with 97% of our students meeting our set goal. But more importantly we know they ALL learned to THINK while solving math problems. The kindergarten teachers are so proud of our students and all they have accomplished this year. In fact, we were so inpsired by the amazing learning we saw going on that we worked together to submit a grant. We were awarded this grant and will now be able to purchase even more math materials for our future students. We are very excited about this!
This week we will continue to learn about plants-what they need to grow and the specific parts of plants. Students will watch their seeds grow (hopefully) and journal about the changes they notice during the week. We will also be reading a variety of fairy tales. Different versions of several familiar fairy tales will be read and we will compare and contrast them together. Kids this age love fairy tales and you may want to check out some fairy tales from the library and read them at home as well. You can find the similiarites and discuss the characters, setting, and plots of each story.
In math we will continue to practice problem solving, addition and subtraction problems, and play with tangrams. Students will also review the 3D shapes as we prepare for our field trip on Wednesday. This last week we learned about the function machine. Have your child use the function machine link on the right side of the blog for practice..it is so much fun!
Speaking of our field trip.....THANK YOU to all the parents that stepped up and volunteered to attend with us. I know how busy this time of year is and it can be hard to find time to get everything done. I am sure you will find the field trip to be a great experience for our students. We will be leaving school on Wednesday almost right away. We will not return until almost 1:00pm. Students will eat lunch in the classroom so please send a sack lunch and drink. (hot lunch will not be available for us this day). The students will be eating later than usual, so please have them eat a BIG breakfast! :)
I would also like to take a moment to thank all the people who made Teacher Appreciation Week so special. The lunches on Monday and all the treats in the lounge all week were AMAZING! The staff felt truly lucky to work with such wonderful, caring parents. I also can't give enough thanks to all the people who took the time to write me a personal note of thanks. I can not express how much these notes mean to me. Each one reminds me of how much I love my job and how important your children are! Thanks again.
The last two weeks of school are just the same as every other week during the year. We will still be going to all our specials as well as meet in our flex groups daily. All library books are due back in the LMC at this time, so please check your homes for any stray books that might be around. Gym shoes are still needed for PE, but art shirts can be removed from the back packs-the students are done with those for the year. I will continue to keep you updated with all that is going on until the final day of school. Enjoy your week! :)
The last two weeks of school are just the same as every other week during the year. We will still be going to all our specials as well as meet in our flex groups daily. All library books are due back in the LMC at this time, so please check your homes for any stray books that might be around. Gym shoes are still needed for PE, but art shirts can be removed from the back packs-the students are done with those for the year. I will continue to keep you updated with all that is going on until the final day of school. Enjoy your week! :)
