Upcoming Dates and Reminders

• Please turn in library books on Monday
• Tuesday, October 1 Picture Day! Please turn in picture forms even if you are not ordering. This is the time to order yearbooks! Yearbooks will come out in the spring, but orders go in now 🙂
• Thursday, October 3 Field Trip to DeGraaf Nature Center Please dress your child for any weather. We will be outdoors for most of the trip.
• October 21 & 22 Parent Teacher Conferences (instructions sent out in email)

Daily 5: This week we had a successful few days building our stamina. We made it to 13 minutes of Read to Self. I love to see the class excited for this. Next week we will work on adding writing to our Daily 5 class time.

Engaging God’s World: We continue our study of our senses as we explore the world. We had a wonderful time with Melissa from the Outdoor Discovery Center on Thursday.

We learned how to make a circle with sticky feet, sticky elbows 🙂 We walked off like a leaf to explore, stopped like a stick and came back to our circle after we called out like an owl. It was wonderful to explore our space down the hill with our senses.

Math: We practiced making circles and then looked for circles outside. We found so many! Try this at home and see how many you find.

Writing Workshop: We are learning that before writing a story, we tell a story. We practiced telling stories that had a beginning, middle and end. This worked well when we all told what we did after school (beginning) until bedtime (end). Try this type of story telling with your child. Next week we will learn how to sketch our stories.

Literacy Centers: We added Nn Oo Pp Qq to our alphabet. Continue to review upper and lower case letters as well as letter sounds.

Bible: We read of Adam and Eve and mistakes that they made. We saw the consequences of their sin and remembered that God made a plan of restoration.

In Devotions this week we learned about respect.

I loved how the devotion explained respect in a way that children can understand. It is something we talk about frequently at home and at school. Thank you for taking the time to read through it!

Upcoming dates and reminders:

• Monday: Please turn in library books and make sure your child has socks for gym shoes
• September 27: No School, Staff Professional Development
• Tuesday, October 1: Picture Day *forms sent home Thursday. Please turn in even if you are not ordering. The company needs correct names for the class composite and yearbook.
• Thursday, October 3: Field Trip to Degraaf Nature Center 9:30-11 (plus drive)

Daily 5: We have started building our stamina for Read to Self. This is a very exciting time in Kindergarten. Now that we have learned that we can read (read the pictures, read the words, retell the story) and have an urgency to learn to read (so we can read to our family and learn new things) we need to build our stamina to read. We began with finding a good spot to read (with few distractions) and learned to read the whole time and stay quiet. We began with 30 seconds and then it was difficult to stay quiet. The next day we made it 2 minutes! Friday we set a new record of 7 minutes! We will continue to see this stamina chart grow and fall in the next few days. Our goal is to have consistent days of 12 minutes.

Literacy Centers: Please continue to review letters and their sounds at home. We are now up to M in our study at school. We are focusing on recognizing upper and lower case letters and also the letter sounds. This week I had to opportunity to meet with each child individually to review all of these. It was so helpful to have them time and see where we are beginning to year. Your children also love the time working with me in the hallway 🙂

Math: We opened up our Math workbooks. I have told the class that sometimes Math is all together on the carpet, sometimes at our tables, sometimes outside and sometimes with our books! They were excited to have books of their own. We do not use workbooks every week, but it is a good way to practice and have a record of growth. We focuses on drawing pictures to represent numbers. I Math centers we combined shapes to make a new one, recgonized numbers on uno cards and built towers with unifix cubes.

Bible: This week we were able to read the amazing story of creation. God is our Creator! What a powerful and creative God He is. We enjoyed sitting outside while reading from our Bibles. We read that God rested on the 7th day.

Our new Bible verse is:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…and God saw all that He had made and it was very good.” Genesis 1:1, 31a

Engaging God’s World: We used our 5 senses outdoors to explore creation. We used our sense of sight to compare what we found.

Upcoming dates and reminders:

• September 20 No PM bus
• Septebmer 27 No School, Staff professional development
• Tuesday, October 1 Picture Day for our class (forms will be sent out closer to date)
• Thursday, October 3 Field trip to DeGraaf Nature Center 9:30-11 (plus travel) *dress your child for any weather 🙂
• Many children took towels home to be washed this weekend. Please send back in the reusable bag Monday! Thank you 🙂
• Please send in library books Monday! New ones will come home if you do 🙂 Students can take these home for the week and enjoy reading with you.
• Please send in any lingering paperwork or family photo. Thank you!
• Please send back your child’s red folder every day

This week in Kindergarten…

Bible: We continue our daily devotions with the Veggie Devos. This week it was amazing to see God’s work connecting our devotions to our study of the fruit of the spirit! We were able to connect to how we act in school: showing love and kindness to our friends-new and old!

We are also working on our theme verse for the year:

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!'” Isaiah 6:8

Math: We drew our own pictures based on the book Anno’s counting book. We were able to enjoy nice weather and used our clipboards to draw outside. We read the book Chicka Chicka 123 and had a fun dice game outside where we read the numbers. We have also been recognizing number 1-10 and learning different way to represent them.

Literacy: Our letter study continued with Dd, Ee, Ff, Gg, Hh. Please continue to review your child’s work when they bring it home to continue to building their letter knowledge.

My Book of Friends: We have added more friends! It is a great reminder that everyone is friends in our classroom.

Engaging God’s World: This is what we call our units in science and social studies. We are beginning to learn about our 5 senses. God has made our bodies to amazing and gave us these senses to explore His creation. We enjoyed using popcorn to explore our senses. We could hear the popping in the microwave, smell the popcorn, see it expand, touch the hot and taste the yummy popcorn.

Daily 5: We are beginning to learn about this framework by starting a conversation on a need to learn to read. We discussion three ways to read a book 1. Read the pictures 2. Read the words 3. Retell the story. Next week we will begin building our stamina for reading to ourself.

We have expanded our classroom jobs to include: line leader, caboose, door holders, table washers, days in school reporter and board cleaner. The class loves to help and it provides good work experience 🙂

We are learning about our flexible seating in Kindergarten. Students are taking turns each day using scoop chairs, stools, soft seats, exercise balls and lap desks. We will continue to learn the rules for flexible seating and test them out more next week! Then we will have a regular rotation of these options.

Important dates and reminders:

• Monday, September 9 Scholastic Book Orders Due online scholastic.com/bookclubs  Our class code is LJ4K7
• September 20 No PM bus
• Septebmer 27 No School, Staff professional development
• Tuesday, October 1 Picture Day for our class (forms will be sent out closer to date)
• Thursday, October 3 Field trip to DeGraaf Nature Center 9:30-11 (plus travel)
• Please send in any lingering paperwork or family photo. Thank you!
• Please send back your child’s red folder every day

This week we continued to build routines and practice, but it is beginning to feel a little more like Kindergarten 🙂 It is so fun to see your children develop friendships and become more independent.

We are trying recess buddies for the next week to help our class continue to build friendships and learn how to play different games on the playground. It was so fun to see them join with newer friends and brainstorm what to play at recess.

Bible: Mr. McAboy talked to all of the kindergarten classes about the Bible. He reminded us that it is God’s word, we learn about God by reading it and God speaks to us through it. It is kind of like seeing the world through Bible glasses. Kindergartners are each given a Bible to use at school and they are so excited to read them! We use the Beginner’s Bible and each child has one in his/her book box.

We are also learning the fruit of the spirit. This week we talked about love, joy, peace and patience.

My Book of Friends: we continue to add friends to our book and recognize how God made each of us uniquely. Our friends are so special!

Literacy Centers: We are reviewing each letter of the alphabet and in alphabetical order. During literacy centers we rainbow write the letter, highlight the letter in a book and decorate the letter with something that begins with the letter sound. This week we focused on a, b, c.

Math: We read Anno’s Counting book this week. It is a book with no words, but beautiful pictures that develop as the pages go from zero to 10. We see a country scene emerge with objects beginning with zero (nothing), then one house, one person, one tree, etc. Each page has increases in number and objects. We took the book outside to learn. We looked around our playground to see if anything outdoors comes in groupings. We saw 4 stools, 3 play sets, 4 soccer goals, 3 logs, etc. It was great to learn outside!

Our Math centers in the afternoon included patterning with shapes and people, reading number books in scoop chairs and representing numbers with colorful square. For example: we can show 6 by using 3 blue and 3 red squares or we can use 1 red and 5 blue squares. It is wonderful to see children grasp this concept.

We are enjoying our specials of music, art and Spanish. We are looking forward to PE and library on Monday.