Ms. Mac’s Newsletter: Week of
February 8th
Hello Kindergarten families of
room 138!
It has been quite a busy week in Kindergarten. The students have had a lot of special
events, new learning concepts, and different schedules in our day.
In Language Arts, the students have been participating in
reading groups on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. During this time, the students are getting
small group instruction for the specific reading levels that they are able to
meet. Reading groups focus on improving
and supporting word identification, fluency, comprehension, and writing about
what they read. The students still have
their Fundations skill work every day; and it has been fascinating to see how
the students transfer their Fundations knowledge into their reading groups.
In the beginning of the
year, the class would participate in “Around the World” with only letters and
sounds. Now when we play, the students
are identifying words and tapping out each sound in each word! It is wonderful
to see the progress and excitement in the students, when they notice how far
they have come.
In Math, the students are learning about money. They have been identifying the value of
pennies and nickels. Each day during number corner, the students observe groups
of five pennies. The students take turns
to see if they can trade the groups in for nickels. This is a fantastic way to practice counting
by five’s. After vacation, the students
will start to learn about the value of dimes and quarters. The students are also continuing to practice
writing addition equations, number trees, and using tallies to record data. They
are doing a super job!
In science, we have been doing a lot of activities around
weather patterns in the winter. One fun
lesson included a study of “What it means when the groundhog sees his
shadow?” Each day we track the weather
and at the end of every week and month, we count how many days we have that
were warm, sunny, rainy, cloudy, cold, and snowy. We discuss whether it has been an average
month or if it has been very different weather than we are used to in the
winter. We have also included fictional
story book characters in our weather lessons like Jack Frost and Mother Nature,
to make further connections to our background knowledge.
In social studies we have been looking at traditions of our
American culture when we celebrate “Groundhog’s Day” and “Valentine’s
Day”. We have also been reading a
variety of Valentine books with characters from “Charlie Brown”, “Arthur”, and
“Little Critter.” We observe how they
celebrate Valentine’s Day and the projects they participate in and whether we
do those same activities in our real life.
To top off this fun week, the students were able to make s’mores
on Wednesday because we were able to reach our PBIS goal for being a “CSR”
school and owning our behavior. On
Thursday, the students from K-3rd Grade went to the Montshire Museum
for a field trip. We were able to
participate in all the hands on experiments and activities. Today, the class celebrated the 100th
day of Kindergarten by making different crafts with 100 items in them, as well
celebrating our Valentine’s Day party.
It was a wonderful way to kick off February vacation!
I wish everyone a fun and restful vacation! See you in a week.
Sincerely,
Tara MacCallum
