April 8-12

Dear Families,

Welcome Back! The kids seemed so ready to be back this week. They have been excellent listeners and hard workers.  The week just flew by.  Can't believe we are getting close to the end of the school year. 

It was nice to have five full days with the children.  We accomplished a lot!

Two new sight words:  your and from

We also concentrated on spelling where, there, little, and they in our literacy centers. 

The kids had word sorts this week.  One group worked on ot, op, and og words. Another group worked on ch, sh, and h sounds.  The final group had an assessment on Monday so they didn't have a sort this week.

We finished Book 3 in handwriting this week.  It should have come home with your child.

For writer's workshop we are concentrating on writing poetry. We had listened and acted out several poems this week. In addition we are writing and illustrating our very own poems.  The kids are doing fabulous!!! I can't wait for you to see the books when they are finished.  We will continue working on writing poems through next week.

I have started introducing reading strategies to the kids. This week they learned Eagle Eyes and Stretchy Snake.  Eagle eyes is looking at the pictures to figure out the unknown word. Stretchy Snake stretched out the sounds slowly to try to figure out the word. The kids used books in their book boxes to practice these skills and recorded the words they were able to read using these strategies.  We will continue with these strategies next week.

In social studies we focused on American symbols and what they stand for.  We learned that the flag has changed a few times throughout the years. We also learned a Flag poem and made our own United States flag.  We watched a video on symbols and then the kids worked with a partner to draw the symbols and write what they learned about them. Finally, today we designed our own flags.

We had a special visitor come teach us a math lesson on coins on Tuesday. Mr. Jewison who was my student teacher 3 years ago came back to visit. He loved the kids!  We focused on the coins and counting by 5s and 10s with nickels and dimes. The kids are starting to combine coins to buy various things.  For example if a sticker costs 8 cents they need to use a nickel and 3 pennies.  They will work more on this in first grade. We just introduce it in kindergarten.  We also started telling time to the hour.  Next week we will practice telling time to the 1/2 hour. 

Please call if you have any questions regarding Quarter 3 report cards.  226-0210

I hope you have a wonderful weekend with your families!

Rochelle Metzger