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!