Dear families,
We are busy doing lots of things in our classroom: we're counting down to the 100th day of school (February 6), we are continuing our inquiry about measurement, tallying and graphing (which we do all year but focus on in second term), and we finished our book studies on The Snowy Day and Thomas' Snowsuit. We completed text-to-self writing (comparing the character Peter's feelings to their own) and text-to-text work. The kids did a great job!
In this week's white bag I sent home a copy of Oh Canada with sight words ("popcorn words") in bold. I'm really pleased how the children are pointing out the words they know when they are reading. I also sent home a list of common sight words, which is also known as a Dolch list, for your reference.
The JK homework for this weekend is to trace their name in upper and lower case letters. The SKs' work is to unscramble the sentences on the "There's 'snow' fooling me" page.
If you have a tape measure (the soft kind for sewing, or a paper one like IKEA has), encourage your child to measure things around the house, and to compare what they measure.
Last week's two sight words for our word wall were IN, and SEE. Please practice them and keep them in the Popcorn Word folder at home. The children are also completing mini sight word books that correspond to the two new words we put on our word wall. Look for those in their white bags too.
The next Scholastic order is due February 27. Thank you so much as always to Megan and her family for collating, date stamping and stapling all those order forms! There are some Valentines items in some of the order forms, so if you would like those earlier let me know. There is a good set of books in the Elf Order called "Guided Science Readers Set A-D" that I would recommend, and the kids might also enjoy the Disney or Superman phonics sets. I have several phonics sets that we rotate through (last week it was the Bob Books, next week it will be the Biscuit books) and the children enjoy reading them to each other.
We are also finishing our fun mini unit on Aliens! The children squished and pulled and squished yellow and blue Model Magic together until green started to appear, then rolled it into a ball to resemble Earth. Then they made a little alien out of white Model Magic, let it dry, and painted it. They look great on our classroom bulletin board. The seniors also created drew and wrote about a pattern block spaceship they designed, then counted, graphed and tallied the blocks they used to make it. They did a terrific job. Congratulations to the SKs too for coming up with over 30 words from the Aliens Wear Underpants story - making 30 words from the letters in "underpants." Silly, but fun and the kids were so thrilled to show me the words they had made with their letters. They are now working on writing out those words. You can do this with any long word. Try it at home! Games like Scrabble are terrific for this kind of exercise.
Thank you so much to our volunteers last week: Claire's dad was the ever-popular Mystery Reader, and Matthew H.'s mom helped out in the Computer Lab. Thank you so much for your time and energy.
February is always a very busy month in Kindergarten with lots of extra opportunities for learning: Groundhog Day is on the 2nd, the 100th Day of School of on the 6th, our Valentine's Craft Party is on the 12th, and Chinese New Year is on the 19th this year.
Next week we'll finish our little unit on Aliens and focus our inquiry on measurement as well as the numbers 1-100: counting by 5s and 10s, recognizing numbers in random order, correct writing of numbers and so on. We are also learning a new song/poem called The Mitten Song. Wednesday is the next Sharing Assembly and Ms. McGee and Ms. Ede-Smith will be directing the children (I will be on a field trip to the Daily Food Bank with the LKS Seeds of Hope students).
I hope you have a wonderful week!
