Kindergarten News

                          May 18, 2009

Dates to remember

Monday –gym

Tuesday – Mass, book mobile

Wednesday – early release

Thursday – fieldtrip to the Zoo

Friday –

Monday – No School

Reading/Language/Phonics:

Last week we read a number of stories dealing with plants, which was our theme for the week.  One of the stories we read was called Tops and Bottoms. This is a very cute story about a rabbit family who tricks a bear.  Ask your child about the story.  We worked in our journals a lot last week.  Our series book last week was called Zoom! Zoom! I’m Off to the Moon!  We reviewed rhyming and worked really hard on figuring out the different vowels sounds we hear in the middle of words.  We concentrated on the short vowel sounds because these are the most difficult to distinguish.  We will continue to look at the beginning, middle and ends of words to help the children become comfortable with attacking words they may not know but can sound out the beginning, middle and end of the word.  The next step is to put the sections together and become a more confident reader. We made one last class book.  In our new story we came across on odd looking chrysalis and I bet you can’t wait to find out what emerged from that chrysalis. We are also working hard with guided reading both in groups and individually. I have been testing the children to find their level of reading and I am very proud of the progress the class has made!

Science:

We are learned about seeds and plants last week. We have learned what a plant needs to survive. We have planted some grass seed in the shape of the first letter of our name. We also did some experiments that we will continue to watch over the next week.  We planted some bean seeds, one container with everything a seed needs. One container will get no water. One container has no soil. The last container gets water but no sunlight.  We hypothesized what will happen to each seed.  We also learned how a plant gets its water by placing celery stalks in colored water and checking the results throughout the day. We also talked about caterpillars and butterflies, which goes along with our plant unit.  For this unit we received five Painted Lady butterfly caterpillars.  We have been keeping track of their growth and are waiting for them to change into chrysalis form.  After this stage they will emerge as butterflies and we will observe and feed them for a few days and them let them go in the butterfly garden.  This has been a fun experiment so far and I hope the children have been sharing their excitement with you.

Math:

We have almost finished our chapter on measurement; we will take the chapter test today.  We will continue to review all of the concepts we have learned throughout the year as well as learn a new concept with our next chapter.  This next chapter will deal with the concept of addition.

Other fun stuff:

·        We had fun watching the 3^rd grade commercials.

·        At one of our centers the children had to match a flower, stem and leaves with ladybugs on them in the correct order.  The flowers had numbers 0 through 30. The stems had the words written out and the leaves had ladybugs in matching numbers on them.

·        The children used pegboards to create pictures.

·        We learned the life cycle of a butterfly and completed a project showing the cycle that starts with an egg.  They are hanging in the hall.

·        Another center had the children taking plastic spoons in which the letters of the alphabet were written in both uppercase and lowercase.  The children had to match the correct spoons and place them in the correct order.

·        We created some awesome butterflies with crayon shavings and an iron.  Check out the classroom windows to see this cool project.

·        We read the story The Tiny Seed  by Eric Carle and the children glued a seed onto a paper and drew roots and a plant that grew from their seed.

·        We had a wonderful snack to go along with our plant unit. For her birthday Kayla brought in ‘dirt’ cups.  Dirt never tasted to good!

Another Mystery Reader Revealed!

Ann’s Mom was our mystery reader last week.  She read us two stories. One of the stories was called Shadow Bear.  There was a game to go along with the story.  Each of the children received a wrapped package and each time the word ‘shadow’ was read the package moved to the person seated next to them.  At the end of the story they got to open and keep the book that ended with them. Thank you for the fun Mrs. Knetter!