Highlights

It was a good week of growth for our class! We continue to practice school routines and learn more each day. I have found when students know what is expected of them they are confident, comfortable, and ready to learn so I don’t mind spending “extra” time on building routines and classroom community and starting curriculum slowly.

Important Dates

• September 26- Field trip to DeGraaf Nature Center 9:30-11 (plus travel)
• September 27- No School (teacher pd)
• October 1- Picture Day for our class

Reminders

• DeGraaf Nature Center: On September 26 we are heading to the nature center to continue our study of the 5 senses. I need at least one more driver please. If you are interested, follow this link. Just a reminder to please give the office a copy of your license and insurance if you plan to drive. (Emailing it to Carrie Papay is fine.)
• Lunch Help Needed Please: Our kindergarten team of teachers would like to meet on Tuesdays during lunch/recess. Jill Emmick (Graysen’s mom) will usually be the one with your students while they eat until they go outside for recess. Thank you, Jill! 🙂 I am looking for someone to cover “lunch duty” on October 22 please. If you are willing, please let me know.
• Towels: I tried to send each child home with his/her towel on Friday. Please wash and return them to school. Already done with the laundry for the weekend? (Way to go!) Just send a different towel to school. 🙂 As a reminder, please no blankets or stuffed animals.
• Toys: We’ve had a couple issues with toys from home getting lost, broken, or just not played with appropriately. We have lots of toys in our classroom. (I even bought some new ones at Holland Christian’s sale on Friday!) Please keep all toys from home at home. 
• Library books: As a reminder, we visit the library on Fridays. Your child may keep his/her book for 2 weeks before it is “over due” however only one library book at home is allowed at a time. You may certainly turn in library books before Friday if it is easier to remember earlier in the week!
  

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Curriculum

Bible: We finished talking about the Fruit of the Spirit and created a motion for each one to help us remember. I hope to use what we learned when we create our classroom contract in the next couple weeks. We also continue to talk about creation. Each kindergartener is making a book with one page for each day of the creation week. This coming week we’ll complete these books and I will introduce our Bible memory verse.

Genesis 8:22 “Mientras la tierra exista habrá siembra y cosecha, frío y calor, verano e invierno, días y noches.”

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

Literacy: We continue to build our stamina in Read to Self. Our goal is to read for 10 minutes on 3 different days. When we do we get to learn about the next choice in The Daily Five!

Our linguistic focus this week was articles, el and la. In Spanish all nouns have genders. El is used for masculine nouns and la is used for feminine nouns. Usually masculine nouns end in -o and feminine nouns end in -a. We noticed the articles before each noun and practiced classifying them together! Next week we’ll learn how the articles change to talk about more than one noun. For example, more than one person is las personas and one person is la persona. Please continue practicing letters names and sounds at home. I am working on assessing these this week to get a starting point and watch for growth over the school year.

• Reading strategy: Determining importance of text
• Read aloud: Un beso en mi mano
• Vocabulary Words:
  • el beso (kiss)
  • el mapache (raccoon)
  • el corazón (heart)
  • la mano (hand)
• Phrase of the week: Ayúdame por favor. (Help me please.)
• Letter of the week/Handwriting Letter: Oo

Math: In our math centers we focused on 1:1 correspondence as we matched numbers to the amount of seeds in an apple and formed play-doh “apples” to put on apple trees. We also played memory together and continued working on patterns.

Writing Workshop: Kindergarteners begin “writing” stories by telling them orally. We practiced thinking of and sharing true stories that have a beginning, middle, and end. This coming week we will continue practicing telling our stories to each other. Next we will draw our stories.

Exploring God’s World: Our first unit is on the 5 senses. This week we went outside and spent time listening to the world around us. We heard water in the drain, an airplane, crickets, an excavator, and the highway. Then we classified things that make noise and don’t make noise.

Up in Lights: Please watch your child’s red folder this week for a schedule and the project pages. If you need to change dates, please switch with another family in our class and let me know! I can help you connect with another family if you need it.

A note from Support Services:

We have so many ways to invite your child into a place of learning this year. Sometimes that happens in the middle of a reading lesson, outdoors gathered around a piece of God’s creation, or as part of a worship time in chapel. It’s important to mention, however, that the members of our classroom offer us chances to learn and grow. We praise God for His creative work in forming each member of our class in a unique way. Each one of us has gifts to share as well as areas of challenge. Those challenges may happen in academic, social, physical, or behavioral areas. As we walk together into the school year, it is our prayer that we resemble a living, breathing picture of I Corinthians 12 – one body together in Christ. We will learn that “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you’”, and we have a chance to learn that “there are many parts, but one body”. We are eager to see how God forms and grows us this year through the gift of each child and adult in our classroom community.

Threeschool-Kindergarten Support Services Teacher

Sherrie Stuursma