Monday, January 26, 2015

January 26, 2015 Newsletter

Dear Parents,

The children are certainly learning quite a bit about sea life!  Their aquariums are on the back wall and they have made octopuses and sea turtles and have learned many interesting facts about them both.  You should ask them how many legs an octopus has and about where the sea turtle lays her eggs!

We had a wonderful Fish Day on Friday!  The students enjoyed visiting all the different Kindergarten classrooms to complete various fish projects.  All the fish projects are now displayed in our hallway…making our own beautiful aquarium.  Make sure you check out my blog post to see some exciting pictures from this very exciting day!

We had a special Superfish Presentation today from the Burlington Science Center.  We learned a lot about the sea creatures we will see at the aquarium and got to see a real dead octopus!  Many of the students even dared to touch it!

We will be celebrating Valentine's Day on Thursday, February 13th by passing out Valentines.  Please don’t attach any candy or other edible items to the Valentines.  If you would like to send something, pencils or stickers make great alternatives to food.  I will send a list home with students later this week for students to use to write out their valentines.  I will also include the names in an email if anyone wishes to start them sooner.  Students can also bring a special snack from home to eat in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day.  They will need a morning and an afternoon snack that day.

The students continue to write in their journals.  We continually encourage them to write on their own in their best guess spelling and not to be afraid to make a mistake.  We have been practicing our letters and numbers but it never hurts to have them practice at home too. The more they write numbers 0-20, the easier and more natural they will become.  The teen numbers are particularly challenging so those are great numbers to practice.  We have finished working on addition in math and talking about joining groups and finding the sum/total.  I will be sending home addition flash cards for you to practice with your child.  Children are supposed to be fluent with these facts by the end of Kindergarten, which means they should be able to say the answers in less than 3 seconds.  I will try to send those home by next week.  We just started working with subtraction last week.

We started our guided reading program last week.  Guided reading enables children to practice reading strategies with the teacher's support in small groups.  This is just the beginning.  It helps your children to become more and more comfortable with text.  It’s amazing how far they have already come since September!

TOMORROW is a SNOW DAY so there will be NO SCHOOL on Tuesday, January 27th.  Because of this, we have rescheduled our trip to the Aquarium for next Wednesday, February 4th.  More information will go home next week regarding the field trip.  Please wait for a call tomorrow night regarding a school cancellation or a delay for Wednesday.

The Burlington Science Center put together some fun snow science activities for students to do at home since tomorrow will be a snow day.  I would encourage you to check out their blog.  www.bsciencecenter.wordpress.com.  I also added a post to my blog with the activities.

Have a great snowy week and enjoy all the shoveling!

 Melanie Duncan and Kerry Marsh

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