This Week in Kindergarten

Here are a few things we will be learning this week...

Reading
We are reading folktales and fairy tales. This week we are focusing on different versions of The Three Little Pigs. We are focusing on the characters and what happens in the beginning, middle and end. We will also talk about how the stories are the same and how they are different.

Sight Words: is, it, in

Word Family: -ug

Writing
We are working on writing longer stories (at least 2 sentences) with more details.

Math

We are still learning about 3-D Shapes. We are also learning how graphs can help us organize information.

Science
We are learning what people, animals and plants do during the fall.

Send Us Your Pull-Tabs

The school is collecting pull-tabs from the top of cans to raise money for the Shriner's Hospital in Houston. So find a safe place to collect them, and when you have some, send them in for a good cause!

We Want Your Pictures!

Kids love to share pictures of all the fun things they do at home. It builds their confidence and builds community in our classroom as a whole! So, if you take pictures of fun things your child does, please e-mail them to me in an attachment. Examples include pictures of parties, holiday activities (you probably have some cute Halloween and Diwali pictures!) or vacations. As a bonus, it gives children ideas of topics to write about in their journals.

For example...here is one of our friends making a Halloween pumpkin...

And here is his really great journal entry about it...


So get busy taking those pictures and send them to me! Thanks!

Books...Lots and Lots of books!

Did you find all of those little books at the bottom of your child's backpack? Please get them out and start reading every night! Make sure your child points to each word as they read. Ask them to find specific words ("Show me the word go.") or letters ("Do you see the letter B on this page?") And have them retell the story with as many details as possible (I know these are very simple stories, but so are the stories we read in the reading assessments, and almost all of the kids had trouble retelling those, which is a requirement for moving to the next reading level!)

Making Words

We are making words! Every week, we learn a different word family, or spelling pattern. We use letter cards and put them together in different ways to make different words.

Here is the -og word family. Look for these cards to come home this week and practice making words at home. Some will have pictures...

Some might not have pictures. Some words are challenging, like words that have consonant blends (i.e. cl). Some might be good vocabulary words (we talked a lot this week about what a clog is!)

Please keep these cards in a safe place and practice making and reading words often with your kids!

Making Shapes

As part of our Shapes unit, we used pattern blocks to see what shapes we could make out of other shapes. We made squares, hexagons, and triangles...
rectangles and trapezoids...

giant rectangles and rhombuses...

But no matter how hard we tried (and we really tried!), we could not make a circle. See if your kids can explain why...

Shape Robots

We had a lot of fun using all the 2-dimensional shapes we learned about to create robots!