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.