Kindergarten News
Nov. 17, 2008
Last week we focused on the letter ‘Q’. What a difficult letter to work with. Not only are there fewer words that begin with Q but, it is also hard for children to figure out that the ‘kw’ sound is the letter ‘Q’.
Dates to remember
Monday - gym
Tuesday – Mass, book mobile, conferences
Wednesday – early release
Thursday – gym, conferences
Reading/Language/Phonics:
We concentrated on the letter ‘Q’ last week. We continue to work with our sight words and recognition of lower and upper case letters. Our story of the week from the reading series was “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel”. We concentrated on recognizing nouns and verbs from the story. We began the idea of summarizing by looking at the important ideas in the story. In our journals we took one important idea from the story and with pictures and words we drew them. When we write in our journals we are using “Kindergarten writing”. This is when the children say the word and write down all the sounds that they hear. For example they may write tbl for the word table. This has a number of functions one of which is to simply make them comfortable about writing in a journal. We have been working a lot with rhyming. Our ‘letter bucket’ continues to be a wonderful tool. What a great job everyone is doing finding items that go into the bucket. This week was exceptionally hard. Our class book last week is called, “Quack, Quack, called the Mama Duck”. The baby duck in our book has gotten lost and Mama is looking everywhere. Find out where Mama duck finds the baby when your child brings the story home.
Math:
We continued with chapter 4 last week. We are working hard with the numbers 6-10. We wrote 6, 7, 8 and 9 in glue and created a glitter six, a feather seven, a soft eight, and a seed or button nine. These masterpieces are displayed in the hall. We also worked more on the written words for the numbers with our Thanksgiving booklets.
Science:
In science we reviewed the map and talked about the water and land a little bit more. Then I asked what else is our Earth made of besides land and water. We talked about air and what it is used for and we found a way to show that there is air all around even if we can’t see it. The children’s ‘air bag’ came home last week. I hope they shared it with you. We also talked about different classifications of animals such as birds or fish. We talked about what makes some animals fish and others birds. The children than used these classification groups and sorted a group of 12 animals into three groups A-Mammals, B-Birds, C-Reptiles, Amphibians and Fish. That paper went home in Friday’s folder.
Religion:
We started talking about Thanksgiving and that it is a time to think about and be thankful for everything that we have. We made thankful wreaths that are hanging on the classroom door.
Other fun things in the class:
· The big word we did a lot with this week was ‘Quilt’. We read a number of wonderful stories that showed how quilts were used by the pioneers as a remembrance of the trip or of special events in their lives by saving bits and scraps of material from items used on the way. When they had enough scraps they sewed them all together and made a quilt. We also learned that there are a number of different patterns that quilts are sewn into.
· We got together with our 4th grade buddies and worked on the pieces for our centerpieces for the faith in the Future campaign event.
· We made quilt patterns with one-inch squares of paper on a large letter Q for our alphabet book. These turned out very colorful. They are hanging on the bulletin board in the hall.
· We read the story ‘Papa and the Pioneer Quilt’. The children couldn’t believe that all the families belongings fit into one wagon and when they finally reached Oregon and built a wonderful home that it was one room and four children slept in one bed with the special quilt that was made from their travels.
· In a few of our stories there were grandparents and the stories were about families from different areas so the children found it interesting to hear all the different names that people have for grandma and grandpa.
· For our Friday letter of the week snack, we had quicksand. Better known as butterscotch pudding with nilla wafers crushed on top and teddy grahams to sink into the quicksand.
K5 saved the Turkeys!!!
Great job on the turkey disguises. They are hanging in the hall and they look great. I hope your family had a good time creating them.