Newsletter 2: Week of September 10

Week Overview

We have completed 7 days of Kindergarten! God is good! Thank you for all that you are doing to help us start this school year off well! I am speaking almost 100% Spanish with the only exceptions being to explain new routines or give important reminders about routines. I am thrilled with the amount of Spanish your children are comprehending and many of them are bravely speaking Spanish to me already! Watching your children as they form beautiful friendships and learn more each day about how to do school together brings me so much joy! At the end of the day on Friday every Kindergartener at school met together in the music room to sing praises to Jesus. We sang “Oh How He Loves You and Me” to continue reflecting on our school theme- Inmersos En Su Amor/Lost in Love. We also sang Jesus Loves Me in English, Spanish, and Mandarin- beautiful! We are looking forward to worshipping together this way each Friday afternoon. If your child was at school Friday afternoon, ask them about this special time. Once a month we’ll move to the media center and the 1st-5th graders will join us in singing.


Important Dates

September 21/October 10: TRIP Registration Meeting

September 26: Field trip to DeGraaf Nature Center

October 19-20: CEA Convention (No School)


Reminders

  • The kids have been doing an amazing job knowing how they are getting home from school! Continuing to review this with your child goes a long way in making them feel comfortable at school. I will continue walking students to the bus until they are comfortable finding their buses by themselves. Even then, I will walk them to the outside doors. Even if I haven’t come back to the classroom yet, you are welcome to come on in and pick up your child. I wish I could be in 2 places at once! As a school we are asking that everyone please wait for the buses to leave before attempting to dash across Central Ave. in front of the bus line. Thanks for helping us keep everyone on time and safe!
  • This week we’ll visit the library for the 1st time at school! The kids may check out a book for 2 weeks but will only be allowed to have 1 book at home at a time. In other words, if your child would like to check out a new book, please help him/her remember to bring the “old” book back to school on Monday! I’ll have a red bin in our classroom to collect the books in.
  • If you haven’t already done so, please turn in our class permission slip and activity fee. If you have multiple kids at ZCS you may write 1 check. Please turn in the permission slip to me and the activity fee to the office.
  • Please feel free to send a water bottle to school with your child. Hydrated brains help us learn and a shorter line at the drinking fountain means we get to head back to learning that much sooner.
  • Thank you for continuing to check the red alert folders. Sometimes they will be empty. This doesn’t mean your child wasn’t learning that day. 🙂 Often we spend our learning time in centers focused around hands-on learning that doesn’t include worksheets.
  • If you would like to order hot lunch for your child please check out the September menu here make sure there is money in your account. Please talk to your child about their hot lunch choice before school. The kids have been doing an awesome job going through the hot lunch line with me!

Curriculum

Bible: God’s creation is amazing! We have learned about the good things God created on days 1-4. Each time we learn about a day of creation I pull out a surprise from the mystery bag that represents what God created on that day. After the lesson, the kids create a new page for their creation book. I love the way slowly going through the creation week in this way helps us focus on our creative God.

Literacy: Our literacy block is taught through The Daily 5. Right now we are building stamina in the 1st of the Daily 5, Read to Self. The kids are working on reading the whole time, staying in 1 spot, and reading quietly. Try asking your child to model how we do these things for you. In our first round we read for 2 minutes! We are graphing our reading stamina together. For more information on The Daily 5, please see the document under the “More Resources” tab.

Our vocabulary words below come from our mentor text, a book that I read out loud and use to focus on different reading strategies.

  • Reading strategy: Determining importance of text
  • Read aloud: Bienvenidos a Kindergarten
  • Vocabulary Words:
    • la oficina (office)
    • divertido (fun)
    • la enfermería (nurse)
    • especial (special)
    • el patio de recreo (playground)
  • Phrase of the week: ¿Cómo estás? Muy bien, gracias. ¿Y tu?
  • Letter of the week: What is a letter? What is a vowel? a, e, i, o, u

Book of Friends: Each kindergartener is working on a book of friends. When the project is complete they will have a page for each of the kindergarten friends in their book. Creating the pages help us focus on our different names- how many letters? vowels or consonants? etc. It also gives us an opportunity to celebrate how God made each one of us unique as we draw a picture of the friend on that page. This week we started with Jesus.  We looked at lots of different pictures of Jesus in different Bibles and the kids drew what they think Jesus might have looked like. Before drawing, we discussed how to draw people without skipping some of the most important features like eyes, hands, ears, etc. 

MathWe are working on counting up to 10 in Spanish and using different manipulatives and strategies to represent the numbers. Try asking your child to find a group of objects that matches the number you tell them. Each morning we count the days of school we’ve completed and do that number of a variety of different exercises. In the afternoons we are working through a variety of math centers that help us practice 1:1 correspondence, counting to 10, fine motor skills, and representing numbers in different ways. We work in the same centers for a little while until we have those skills mastered. Then we move on to another set of centers to continue growing as mathematicians. 


Thank you, again, for a wonderful 7 days of school! If you have any questions at all, please ask! I’m looking forward to our first full week! 

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