Weekly News---Blog Style!

We can't believe this week will bring the close to our first month of kindergarten already.  We were SO proud of our kiddos last week during our staff developers visit.  While she was in our classroom coaching teachers and working with students, our class 'read' to themselves and their partners for nearly an HOUR!  Yes.  Really.  To celebrate a week of hard work we told an apple story and found stars inside our apples before eating them with caramel.  There was a lively debate about whether or not apple trees would grow in their bellies if they eat a seed.  Please keep us posted if your child sprouts an apple tree.  :)

Upcoming Important Dates:

Friday, Oct. 9th: Black, Orange, and Crazy Hair Day!  Homecoming Parade

Friday, Oct. 16th: Math Morning

Tuesday, Oct. 20th: Family Night

Thursday, Oct. 22 and Friday, Oct. 23: No School for Students

Oct. 26-30th: Red Ribbon Week
Oct. 27th: Field Trip to Heckrodt and Kaukauna Fire Dept (more info coming soon)

***To help us be prepared for field trips and opportunities to volunteer in the classroom later this year, please let us know if you need a background check form.  Background checks take 2-3 weeks to be verified and are required every 5 years.***

Reading: The students LOVED teaching their new "old favorite storybook" to their table during reading this week.  Brianna worked with our class on Thursday teaching us to build oral language skills through retelling stories.  We are looking forward to creating some class books together using some of her ideas!  We will start noticing and reading some words in our old favorite storybooks this week before we wrap up this first unit on Friday by throwing a Reading Parade with the other kindergarten class!  Stay tuned for pictures!

Writing:  We are off and running with writing true stories!  This week we will work on telling the true stories about our lives, just the way we read our "old favorites" in reading.  We will really focus on adding details to our stories as we tell them and will then try our best to capture those details in our pictures.  We will also be working extra hard to stretch out words and labels in our writing and will even be adding speech bubbles to our stories to show what characters are feeling and saying.

Math:  We will focus our work this week on ordering numbers 1-10 and also showing number quantity up to 10.  We will pay special attention to seeing/creating a group of 5 when showing numbers 6-10 using math tools.  We will also be working with the concepts of addition and subtraction and will be introduced to how to solve addition and subtraction problems using our fingers.  Our math centers this week will be:  building and comparing numbers using unifix cubes, working to order number cards and finding the missing number in the sequence, sorting photographs based on the quantity shown and working with number formation on the iPads. 

Social Studies: We will start our interviews for our school study this week by interviewing Mrs. Frischmann and Mrs. Wydeven.  The students are excited to visit these staff members in their offices to learn about the jobs they do, who they help, and the tools they use.  After our interviews we will be writing class books about each person!

Have a great week!

Welcome to our Kinder Blog!

Hello K Families!

Last week we learned about and practiced many safety drills at school.  These conversations of course sparked many questions about emergencies and being prepared.  With all of this fresh in your child's mind, this might be a great time to review safety plans in your own home!  This week will be another exciting week as we welcome our staff developer, Brianna Parlitsis, from Columbia University.  She will be planning with and coaching all of our teachers in reading and writing, along with leading lab sites in classrooms.  With her visit, each class will have a "guest teacher" for a 2 hours Wednesday-Friday while the classroom teachers work with Brianna.  You may notice our guest teacher pick the students up outside in the morning, since Brianna will be working with 4K-1st grade teachers right away.  

Upcoming Important Dates:

Tuesday, September 22: No School for Students

Thursday, September 24: Family Night: Hot Dogs and How to Help

One change in upcoming events: Math Morning has been moved from October 9^th to October 16^th.   Our math consultant from Butler University in Indiana, Ryan Flessner,  will be at New Directions on October 15^th and 16^th working with students and teachers.  Ryan is eager to also meet with New Directions families on the morning of October 16^th  to share some wonderful math knowledge. 

***To help us be prepared for field trips and opportunities to volunteer in the classroom later this year, please let us know if you need a background check form.  Background checks take 2-3 weeks to be verified and are required every 5 years.***

Reading: It was very exciting to move into "reading" old favorite storybooks this week.  Please continue reading...and reading...and reading...the storybook your child brought home last Thursday to help them turn it into an old favorite that they can "read" by telling the story themselves.  These books can be sent back to school with your child on Wednesday.  Students will have a chance to share their new old favorite story with their reading partner later this week.  We are continuing our work in storybooks in the classroom as well, trying to say even more on every page to make our words match the text and connecting pages to make our reading sound even more grown up by using phrases like "and then" and "after that." 

Writing:  This week in writing we continue working hard to make our teaching books the best they can be.  We will even use a writing checklist to see where we can add to our books…I know the boys and girls will feel so grown up doing this.  Later this week we will be learning to write true stories! This means we will be taking an event from our lives, telling that story and then working to show it in pictures and words across three pages.  We will practice this work as a class be writing a few class “true stories” together. 

Math:  In math this week our focus will shift from showing number quantity to comparing number quantity.  We will learn about a new math tool called a comparing mat that will help us to distinguish numbers as greater than and less than.  We will also be exploring and classifying shapes.  This week we will focus on the characteristics of circles, squares and rectangles.  Our math centers will be: using a comparing mat with tiles to observe number size, creating our own counting books, sorting shapes and using tiles to begin some work with adding. 

Social Studies: Now that we are settling into the normal routines of school and have built the foundation for our classroom community, we will be kicking off our first social studies unit.  This unit is a School Study.  This week we will build some background on our school study and list all the different jobs that people in our school do.  We will formulate interview questions and do a practice interview on Mrs. Hixon and I.  In the coming weeks we will take many tours and conduct interviews of these people to learn all about our school.

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Have a great week!!