Week Four

Here are a few updates for the week:

* Friday folders came home today. As a reward for having all four stickers in their folder for the month of September, I had a special treat to share with everyone at the end of the day! They were supposed to keep it in their pocket until they asked their parent if they could eat it =)

* In their Friday folder you will find:
      - Picture day order form (due next Friday, you can turn it in beforehand if you'd like)
      - October homework calendar (if you're looking for some quick "homework" activities to do with          your child, you can refer to this calendar.)
      - Fun Friday craft from last week- tissue paper letter
      - Workbook pages from their math journals
      - Activity pages from literacy/ math centers

* Field trip money is due on Tuesday, September 30th. Please send in a check for $18 dollars made out to "Lakeside Elementary"

* If you haven't done so already and would like to, please submit your information for our room parent if you would like to be a field trip driver or help out with our holiday parties this year. Providing your e-mail address will be here only way to contact you about these events.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_adjXqXFANMLe2kdQ0d81HCvkAlsohAs6l9W-Cu6KkI/viewform?usp=send_form

* Book bags will start coming home next week. As I mentioned at our parent information night, right now you will see paper books but starting sometime in October you will see real books coming home. Whatever book it may be, please make sure to send it back to school in the reading bag the next day.


What we are learning about in school:

* Literacy: we spent a lot of time this week focusing on letter names/ sounds as well as rhyming words. A simple game to play in the car is "rhyming war". Go back and forth with rhyming words until someone is stumped! Then start again with a new rhyming family.

* Writing: Our focus in writer's workshop is "teaching people something we know". So right now we are planning and writing teaching books basically about anything they know. For example, one student wrote a book that said:
     Page 1: I know about bats.
     Page 2: They fly in the twilight. (yes, she used the word twilight- I was very impressed!)
     Page 3: They sleep during the day
Some other topics ranged from teaching about basketball, soccer, butterflies, recess, dogs, dancing, etc. Right now I am seeing a lot of letter strings, some sight words and even just some squiggly lines. This is all considered writing at this stage in kindergarten! So if you see your child doing any of these things, please praise them for this! We want to keep encouraging them to be writers!

* Science: We continued to learn about forces and motion. This week we learned about positional words: up, down, next to, in between, above, below, behind, in front of, etc. We will begin experimenting with balls and ramps next week.

* Math: This week we focused on matching sets of objects with numbers and showing that number with counters in a five frame. I also introduced a new math game called Bump. This is a great number recognition and counting game.