Weekly News: September 13

News: 

This week we will be studying and reading books about apples. On Friday, we will have a fun apple tasting in our classroom. We are asking each child to bring in one apple (red, green, or yellow). Each child will decide which color apple tastes the best and we will make our very first classroom graph! Please see the classroom door for the apple sign-up sheet so that we get a variety of different color apples. Thank you!

Thank you so much for all of your Scholastic Book Orders! I placed the order on Friday so in a few weeks, your new books will be delivered to our classroom! Thank you for ordering online - with every order you place online, we get a free book for our classroom so this significantly helps me add to our classroom library!!!

Our parent volunteer program began last week. Thank you for donating your valuable time in our classroom! A reminder: if you cannot make one of your scheduled days, please either "cover your shift" with another parent or let me know so that I can adjust our activities accordingly. Thank you for your support!

Over the next four weeks, we will begin sending home Book Bags with your child. Book Bags are to be brought back and forth, home to school, every day. Book bags are also an ESSENTIAL part of your child's home reading - they should be reading these books EVERY DAY for homework. We will only be started one group each week, so look for your child's book bag sometime in the next month.

Thank you for your field trip t-shirt donations. Our classroom moms are working hard to make our t-shirts so special! I know there have been a lot of questions about our upcoming field trip. We will be going to the Los Rios Ranch Apple Orchard on Friday, October 8th. More information about the field trips and chaperoning will come at a later date!

Our "What Are We Learning This Week?" and "Homework" sections can be so repetitive and a lot of reading. To make things a little easier for you, I will be posting all the new information each week IN RED. Thank you so much for taking the time to read our news each week and stay up-to-date on what we are doing in class!

What Are We Learning This Week?:

Sight Words: YOU, AND, IT, FRIEND.

Letter Team: WH (like in "what" and "whistle").

Reading: This week, we will continue to focus on the strategy, "Look through the word at all the sounds". Please help your child with this by having them "stretch out" each word they are struggling with by saying the sound of each letter in the word then blending it together. For example, the word CAT can be decoded "C-A-T, then blended together, CAT". This may seem extremely easy, but kindergartners actually have a tough time grasping the concept of blending. This week, we will continue to read books about apples, read books about Johnny Appleseed, and read our special poem of the week, "A-P-P-L-E".

Writing: We are writing a big book together about the life cycle of an apple using sight words we have learned so far. We will be studying how an apple grows, from seed to tree to blossom to apple. We will continue learning to put spaces between each word, use an uppercase at the beginning of each sentence with lowercase letters throughout the rest of the sentence, and use a period at the end. We are also learning to use our sight words in our sentences and to listen for the sounds in all unknown words using our sound chart. You can help your child at home by using the same sound chart on the back of your GO Folder to help with sounding out words and writing at home.

Math: Last week, we learned the name and value of each coin and this week we will start counting money! You can help at home by having your child name and tell you the value of coins around the house. This week, we will also learn how to tell time to the hour. We will learn that when the "big hand points up, it means o'clock". We will continue to learn how to identify, order, and count numbers to 30 and how to write numbers to 10. We will also continue learning the days of the week, months of the year, shapes, how to read and extend patterns, and identify what number comes next.