Kindergarten News

May 11, 2009

Dates to remember

Monday –gym

Tuesday – Mass

Wednesday – early release

Thursday – gym

Friday –

I hope everyone had a nice Mother’s Day and gave Mom a day off!  Last week we finished up the ocean unit and started our plant unit.  We will continue with our plant unit this week.

Reading/Language/Phonics:

We have made it through the entire alphabet concentrating on one letter at a time each week.  The children again voted to keep up the letter bucket so it will go around the class once more with each child getting a choice of any letter they wish.  Thank you for the time you put into the bucket.  It is a good phonics lesson and makes the children concentrate to find more things for the bucket.  For the remainder of the school year we will be reviewing all of letters and introducing some blended sounds (tr, fr). Last week we did some activities that focused on the entire alphabet.  We also worked on sentences and getting our thoughts down on paper into a complete sentence.  We did a fun activity where each of the children wrote an adjective and noun on pieces of paper.  On the board I had the sentence: THE _____ GORILLA ATE A ____.  The children took turns putting their adjective and noun into the sentence.  We had a good laugh at some of the silly sentences that were created.  I have been testing the children using a new assessment series the entire school started last year.  I will let you know the level your child is at and this will help you in choosing books that are at the right level and maybe books that will challenge their reading ability over the summer. 

Math:

We started a new chapter and are working on measurements and estimation.  We are learning vocabulary and sequencing of small, medium and large and shortest to longest. We will continue with measurement and move onto addition and subtraction before the end of the school year.

Science:

We finished up on our ocean unit last week.  We added jellyfish and stingrays to the ocean in the hall. We also had a conch shell that was made into a conch trumpet and the children enjoyed trying to made noise from it.  I then introduced our plant unit. We learned about seeds and plants in general. The children should be able to tell you the four main parts of a plant are the root, stem, leaf and flower.  We also learned what a plant needs to survive.  We will continue this unit and do a number of experiments with seeds and planting things.  We also have some butterfly larvae coming and we will be learning and watching the different stages of growth that occur with the Painted Butterfly.

Other fun stuff:

·        The Mary statue was crowned with a crown of flowers in our May crowning celebration.

·        We made seed booklets.  After we picked the type of seed we wanted to plant we created the booklet to show the progress of our seeds.

·        We raffled off our jungle snakes and jungle cats. 

·        We worked on estimating.  The children should be able to tell you that when we estimate we are using information to make our best guess.

Another Mystery Reader Revealed!

We had another mystery reader last week.  Ty’s Mom came in and read us a fun story about how much love we can have (as much love as the stars in the sky).  We then made the lovely lilies from each child’s hand as a project to go along with the story.  We also got some home made chocolate chip cookies as a special snack!  Thanks Mrs. Szczerbinski!