Weekly update 3/28

 Important upcoming dates:

4/5: Fine Arts Festival at Archway Lincoln with PaperPie Booksale

4/18-4/21: No School

4/25: Birthday Book Club, Spirit Day, Treat Friday

5/9: Kindergarten Field Trip - more information soon

5/21: Kindergarten promotion 

**Doors open @ 10:30, ceremony starts @11:00 am, all classes together**

Save the Date - Fine Arts Festival

On Saturday, April 5, from 9am-1pm, we will hold a Fine Arts Festival. Bring the family and enjoy a walking tour of artwork, recorded Music performances, PaperPie Book Fair (one day only!) Food trucks, face painting, picture props, and more family fun!

Spalding:

Continue to review all the phonograms. Try to take time to determine which phonograms your child doesn't know and do extra practice with them. We have noticed that they might know them when they see the cards, but do they know them when you say the sounds and they need to write them. This is a more difficult skill, which is especially important for sounding out words and writing sentences. 

Literature:

Continuing our unit on Children's Literature, we enjoyed reading The Velveteen Rabbit together this week. We talked about our toys and stuffed animals that mean so much to us and all the ways we play with them and love them. We recognized the feelings the Velveteen Rabbit had throughout the story. We loved the surprise ending and were happy for the Velveteen Rabbit. For Poetry, we reminisced about one of our past poems Winter Wind. We had fun reciting it again and went deeper, counting the lines and discovering the rhyming words. We also talked about what the weather was doing in each of the stanzas. Finally, Grammar taught us about exclamatory sentences and when to use an exclamation point. We enjoyed hearing how someone's voice changes when reading these expressive sentences. The scholars agreed these sentences show strong emotions such as excitement, frustration, or anger.

Math:

Scholars practiced several ways to solve subtraction sentences this week. We will start to hone in on which method they prefer the most and ask them to continue to use that preferred method to build accuracy. In many ways it is helpful for it to be the same method they chose for solving addition equations, but it can vary. The goal is to consistently obtain the correct answer while understanding the process. Eventually, we will move to rote memorization, but it is still important now that we focus on the process and how we solve the subtraction problems.

History:

We learned about countries Peru and Ecuador located in the continent South America this week. We looked at Machu Picchu and discovered that it is on an old mountain with 140 buildings within the city and 100 flights of stone steps. We also learned that the Inca Empire used llamas to help move materials up the mountain. 

Weekly Update 3/21

  Important Upcoming Dates:

3/28: Spirit Wear, Birthday Book club & Treat Friday

4/5: Fine Arts Festival at Archway Lincoln 

4/18-4/21: No School

5/9: Kindergarten Field Trip - more information soon

***Kinder celebration will be held on May 21st at 11 am***

Save the Date - Fine Arts Festival

On Saturday, April 5, from 9am-1pm, we will hold a Fine Arts Festival. Bring the family and enjoy a walking tour of artwork, Recorded music performances, Food trucks, face painting, picture props, and more family fun!

IMPORTANT:

It is time to send in the student readers from Part A&B consumables. Please do so next week. Make sure it has your child's name is written inside the cover.
Little Bear (Box set)- Else Holmelund Minarik ISBN: 978-0064441971  
Mouse Soup - Arnold Lobel ISBN: 978-0064440417

Spalding:

Phonograms learned 1-70. Please spend time practicing 10-15 cards nightly. Please focus on saying the sounds so they can write the matching phonogram. Hearing the sounds helps to build their sense of recognition for spelling words and writing sentences. 

*When reading and writing, help your scholar identify phonograms in the words and silent e-jobs to better understand the sounds they should read or need to spell words. 

Literature:

We spent our week reading The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. We enjoyed hearing about all the fun Pooh had with his friends. We learned that a narrator is someone who tells a story. We learned Pooh loves honey and is always a great friend. He often gets into trouble because he loves honey, but his friends are always willing to help him. For Poetry, we looked at one of the songs Winne the Pooh and Piglet sing together called The More It Snows. It has silly words and rhymes. In grammar, we began talking about questions and how when you're reading and speaking, it makes your voice change. We practiced asking, writing, and using a question mark in our sentences. 

Math:

We have switched our focus from addition to subtraction. The students explored the concept of subtraction in broad situations, discussing real life scenarios they may experience. For example, "I had 5 balloons. 2 of my balloons burst. How many balloons do I have left?" We practiced subtraction within 10 using pictures to match subtraction equations, crossing out how many are being taken away and circling what is left, then writing the matching subtraction sentence themselves. We have stressed the importance of what the subtraction symbol (-) means and how it differs from the addition symbol (+). 

History:

This week in history we traveled to a new continent, South America. The children were so excited to sing their favorite song about the continents, and learn about some of the different climates, and traditions of the continent south of us. The children loved the game we played from Colombia where they held on to a string and passed a small straw around the string. The child in the middle with their eyes closed had to guess who had the straw hiding in their hands. It's similar to hot potato. The children had so much fun and asked to play it again soon. 

Science

We started our new weather patterns unit this week! As an introduction, the students completed an experiment with water droppers and water, concluding that we can use water as a means of cooling off in case of a heat wave. They were introduced. They were introduced to other vocabulary, similar to heat, that we could use to describe the weather such as sunny, cloudy, cold, etc. We put on our scientist caps and began to fill data into a weather observation chart. We recorded the date, time, temperature, and other words to describe the weather at one specific moment. 

Weekly Update 3/7

We have finished the third quarter! The children have learned so much this year, and are excited for all the fun things planned for the rest of kindergarten!

Important upcoming dates:

3/10-3/14: Spring Break

Upcoming Quarter 4:

3/28: Spirit Wear, Birthday Book club & Treat Friday

4/5: Fine Arts Festival at Archway Lincoln with Usborne Booksale

4/18-4/21: No School

4/25: Treat Friday, Birthday Book Club, Spirit Shirt Day

5/9: Kindergarten Field Trip - More info coming soon

***Kinder celebration will be held on May 21st at 11 am***

Spalding:

We aim to continue building recognition of the 70 phonograms and the weekly words. With the words, we talk about why the letters say the sounds referencing the rules so that there is an understanding of which phonogram to use. These words are most often sight words so we also hope they will recognize these words in the books they are reading. Keep encouraging writing at home through random words as well as building sentences. Practice with this is crucial for 1st grade. Make sure as you practice you keep switching the order to give them the best practice. 

Literature:

We have finished our chapter book Mr. Popper's Penguins! There was a fun surprise at the end of the book so talk to your scholar and find out how it ended. 
This week we also enjoyed reading the other side of the Fairy Tales. We read versions where we heard Goldilocks, Cinderella, Snow White and The 3 Little Pigs from the perspective of another character in the story. It was fun to talk about how people have different experiences even when they go through the same thing. We found many of these stories silly and really enjoyed them.  In poetry, we read Little Boy Blue and talked about what he should have been doing instead of sleeping. In Grammar, we focused on retelling a story from the illustrations from our past Fairy Tales. 

Math:

We started our new unit of subtraction talking about how it is the opposite of addition. We spent time discussing subtraction stories using pictures talking about the whole. We then discussed taking part away and asking what is left. We ended the week introducing the subtraction equations using minus and equals. 

History:

This week we learned about our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln. We learned about his childhood and how his fight for equality led him to become one of our most popular leaders. We discussed why he was often called "Honest Abe" and how we could also strive to display our virtue of honesty. The students were amazed to realize that our school is named after him because of all of the honorable things he did for our country. We also learned about Teddy Roosevelt. We have him to thank for our national parks, and the teddy bear! The children created their own teddy bear:)

Science:

We finalized our unit on motion of push and pull. We spent time reviewing activities and reading a fun book called Newton and Me which put all our motion and forces together in a fun way.