Important Dates

November 21: Thanksgiving Day Chapel 1:oo pm

November 21: Picture Trading & Bite-sized Snacks to Share

November 22-24: Thanksgiving Vacation

December 15: NO pm bus or hot lunch

December 22: Christmas Party in our classroom 10:15-11:45am

December 25-January 5: Christmas Vacation

Picture Trading: In celebration of Thanksgiving we will trade pictures of ourselves with our friends. This lesson will go along with our brief learning about the First Thanksgiving. Please send in wallet size photos or 4×6 size photos of JUST your child. Your child will need to bring in 19 copies. Often Meijer or Snapfish will run a deal with photos costing just a few cents. I am informing you early, with hopes you can find a deal somewhere. 🙂 We will trade photos on November 21st.

Thanksgiving Snack: We will have a feast in our class for our morning snack. Please send in a 20 bites of your child’s favorite food. (example: if your child loves strawberries, please send in 20 strawberries so each child and adult will have one on their plate). We will share of favorite snack and we will eat 20 different bites of food. 🙂

It was a great 5 day week in Kindergarten!

Daily 5 was a highlight for me this week. The class is doing well choosing their options each day from Word Work, Work on Writing, Read to Someone and Read to Self.  I have a schedule of meeting with children twice a week.  This is so much for! We play letter games to build recognition and letter sound awareness. We also learn how to read books and read a few together. This weekend your child brought home a plastic zip top bag with a game or book inside. Please make sure to read or play with them. They are so excited to share what they are learning with you! Please send the bags and contents back to school on Monday.

In Bible we learned about Moses.  This story is so full of God’s faithfulness and big plan.  It was hard for us to imagine that so many years passed after Joseph and that the new Pharaoh had such a hard heart.

In handwriting we practiced letter Y and Z.  Once again, by starting in the proper place, we are able to form letters neatly.  We are building the habit of starting at the top.

In Math we had fun acting out addition problems and then saying them. We are also seeing groups of numbers and realizing it it faster to count when we can see these groups.  We used one hand as a five group, when we counted to 7, we could already start with 5 and then add 2 more. Each day we continue to count the days of the week with movement (clapping, stomping, jumping jacks, push up, etc) and practiced counting by 10s.

In Phonics we are looking to our alphabet chart to help us find the beginning sounds of words. We practice saying words slowly to hear the sounds.

In Exploring God’s World, we are learning about the earth. To get us started we played a game with an inflatable globe. Each child had a marker dot on one finger. We tossed the ball to every student and kept tally of how many times the finger with the dot landed on water and how many times it landed on land. We could see that the earth has a lot of water! This coming week we will be examining earth materials-sand, soil, rocks, water.

Word Wall Words-We added “is” to our word wall. In poetry to hunted for “is”. We also reviewed the word “look” with a take home book.  The class was excited to take those books home to read to you!

Important Dates:

November 21: Thanksgiving Chapel 1pm

November 21: Picture Trading & Thanksgiving Snack

November 22-24: Thanksgiving Break

Picture Trading: In celebration of Thanksgiving we will trade pictures of ourselves with our friends. This lesson will go along with our brief learning about the First Thanksgiving. Please send in wallet size photos or 4×6 size photos of JUST your child. Your child will need to bring in 19 copies. Often Meijer or Snapfish will run a deal with photos costing just a few cents. I am informing you early, with hopes you can find a deal somewhere. 🙂 We will trade photos on November 21st.

Thanksgiving Snack: We will have a feast in our class for our morning snack. Please send in a 20 bites of your child’s favorite food. (example: if your child loves strawberries, please send in 20 strawberries so each child and adult will have one on their plate). We will share of favorite snack and we will eat 20 different bites of food. 🙂

Cooler weather: As you may have noticed, we go outside for recess every day!  If the rain isn’t falling, then we are out there.  Feel free to have your child wear rainboots if it has been raining and then use gym shoes for indoor shoes.  The same for snow, snow boots for outside and gym shoes for inside.  Please send along hats and gloves and try to label tags with your child’s name on them.  We will try to remind your child to put them on and put them in backpacks when not being used.

Weekly recap:

In Phonics we practiced saying words slowly.  This helps us hear the sounds in a word at the beginning, middle and end.  We practiced using our alphabet chart to look for the letter for sounds.  We kept one chart for our writing folders and sent another home for your child to use their.

Word Wall-we added me and up to our word wall. We will continue to review the words we have already introduced and add more.  Here is list of the words we have learned: I, a, the, look, at, me, up, go, see and we.

Poetry-we look for our word wall words in poetry and enjoy illustrating the poems.

Math-We practiced looking for items in groups.  This helps us as we count items.  Our next Math unit will have us looking for 5 groups as we add.

Writing Workshop-it has been so fun to watch your children grow more confident sketching stories and labeling them!  I love listening to them sound out their words.

Handwriting-We practiced writing 6.  It is amazing to see the progress once we practice tricky numbers and letters on chalkboards.

Bible: We continue to talk about God’s love for us and how we can share this with others. We forgive, because God forgives us.  We try to bring out the best in others, because that is what God wants of us.

Daily 5: we are choosing our options for Daily 5 and using a check list picture chart to make sure that everyone is able to go to all of the centers in one week. This power of choice is amazing.  I have been able to work with small groups during Daily 5-which I love.  This week we talked about and practiced reading a book and pointing to words with our fingers as we read them.  This helps us read the correct word and follow along.

November 8-9: No PM Bus / No Hot Lunch

November 8-9: Parent/Teacher Conferences – Evening – K-8 School in session

November 9: Picture retakes

November 10: No School

Picture Trading: In celebration of Thanksgiving we will trade pictures of ourselves with our friends. This lesson will go along with our brief learning about the First Thanksgiving. Please send in wallet size photos or 4×6 size photos of JUST your child. Your child will need to bring in 19 copies. Often Meijer or Snapfish will run a deal with photos costing just a few cents. I am informing you early, with hopes you can find a deal somewhere. 🙂 We will trade photos on November 21st.

Picture Retakes: If your child would like his/her picture retaken, please SEND YOUR CHILD’S UNCUT PICTURE PACKET to school on picture retake day- November 9. This serves as the reorder form and is necessary. If your child missed getting his/her pictures taken, there are new picture envelopes in the office for ordering.

In Bible we reviewed the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob & Esau.  We learned that even in the Bible, people made mistakes and brothers fought, but God forgives and we can also forgive.  Big lessons for our Kindergartners!

Daily 5-Thank you to those able to help in class. We introduced two forms of word work this week. One uses play dough to build letters. First students must say the letter on the mat, and then the letter sound and the picture.  Then they get to build the letter with play dough. This is quickly becoming a favorite activity and one you can easily do at home. We also have new letter sound mats they list a two letters. Students have a stack of picture cards and need to say the picture and figure out which letter their word begins with.  This has been great practice!  We are building independence in read to self, read to someone and writing.  In the next few weeks the class will be choosing their activities during daily 5 time and keeping track with a chart.  Choice is such an important part of Daily 5 and the kids become very responsibly using the chart to make sure they do all of the choices in a week.

Phonics-We reviewed a new alphabet chart this week that helps us with letter sounds. We will use this chart as a reference this whole school year when we are sounding out words in reading ands writing. Each child will also get a copy to keep at home and school.

Writing-We sketched stories of something we did with our families and labeled them.  The class is getting really good at labeling. It is so fun to see this growth.

Handwriting-Along with practicing letters V and W, we have also practiced 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 on chalkboards. I have already seen such growth in number formation.

Word Wall-we added the word we to our growing word wall list.  It is again so fun to see the kids excited when they see the words in their reading books, around the room and here it throughout our day. When reading the books at home, you can read the majority of words, but stop every now and again on words like: the, we, at, look, see and a and have your child read that part.

Math-We took our first Math test this week! I told the class that a big part of taking a math test, was listening to my instructions. They did very well! They are understanding groups of numbers, shapes and number order (1, 2, 3, 4, 5…).

It was wonderful to celebrate Caleb Up In Lights this week!  A highlight for me was looking at the picture book from Caleb’s baptism and having some discussion about what means and talking bout seeing that at our churches.

From the office:

2017-2018 ZCS Family Directory: The ZCS Family Directory contains staff, Board members, and family contact information as well as class lists. The directory remains in Google Docs, has been fully updated, and will continue to reflect the most current information. Please email zcsinfo@zcs.org to request changes or updates. (Remember to take notice of the tabs across the bottom of the document for easy access to each section!)

2017-2018 ZCS Family Handbook: The ZCS Family Handbook contains information such as school start times, cancellations and delays, calendar, dress code, hot lunch information, etc. It can be found on the ZCS Parents page. Scroll down to find the link.