Our Weekly News Oct. 9-13

 

Dear Families,

Spooky spooky season is here - hooray! Your children are loving all of our Halloween songs, Halloween freeze dances and poems! This week we sang a fun version of the Itsy Bitsy Spider! Be sure to ask your child to share it with you!

ELA Skills

This week we added the sounds of o, c, g and i to our sound wall.  We also learned about vowels: we use an open mouth when we make the sounds of a vowel, vowel sounds are the sounds that can be stretched out when saying a name or word, and all words contain at least one vowel sound.  Ask us to sing Happy Birthday only using the vowels😀 We have been very busy blending, reading and spelling words with all of the sounds from our word wall - m t a d o c g and i!! We also worked on drawing a picture of each of these sounds.  We can practice all of these skills at home, too!! Thank you for checking our homework bag each night and practicing the skills on the pages.

ELA Knowledge

We finished up our 5 senses unit this week with some special centers! Be sure to ask your child which center they liked the best!

At the feely bag center we had to use our sense of touch and reach in the bag and try and match the item that was on the card.  There were all sorts of fun textures to find...sand paper, burlap, feathers, cotton, fur, rocks, buttons and so much more!

We used our sense of smell to figure out what sent was in the plastic cup.  Was it peppermint, vanilla, lemon, cinnamon, lavander or orange?

At the hearing center, we had to listen carefully to the animal sounds and then cover up each animal on our smartboard game board.

Making our names in Braille was the highlight of the sight center!

Be sure to ask your child what we tasted for sour, sweet, bitter and salty.  Sweet was the overall winner - are you surprised??

Such a fun way to celebrate ALL that we learned!

We are so excited about our next unit on Stories! We have already listened to Chicken Little, The Three Little Pigs and Three Billy Goats Gruff.  We are doing a great job of identifying the characters and sequencing the events. We even wrote the words to our own version of the Three Billy Goats Gruff today! Be sure to ask us if these stories are fiction or non-fiction!

Math

This week we were introduced to a new math tool! It has a few different names - number rack, math rack or rekenrek. Number racks facilitate the natural development of our kindergartners' number sense.  The 2 rows of red and white colored beads encourage our little mathematicians to think in groups of 5s and 10s.  Be sure to ask your child if they enjoyed using the math rack during math class this week!

Thorson Stewardship day is on Monday, October 16th

*Dress for the weather - we will be headed outside to spread wood chips in the       Nature Center.

*Bring work gloves or regular gloves to protect your hands.

*Bring boots - we are expecting a lot of rain between today and Monday

*Wear green if you can!