Welcome to a new week in Kindergarten! Kindergarteners continue to learn about responsibility. Last week they took an important message from 3C’s assembly and passed along the responsibility medal. It was wonderful to see our young students noticing positive behavior in others and sharing compliments. This week we will have more opportunities to be kind to others and to learn how important it is to have partners and to collaborate.
We hope you all enjoyed reading the book for our respect core value, “One”. Soon we will be sharing CAC’s book for responsibility.
Weekly reminders!
- Our dynamic grade level calendar! Always look out for upcoming activities and events, we also include the Monday menu for hot lunch and important information for parents shared on The Eagle Eye.
- Monday lunches. If your child will buy koshari (this week!) or pizza, we kindly ask that you send the exact change in the lunch’s envelope. This will support your child’s independency at school.
- Home reading practice. One of the responsibility examples students have given is bringing their books back to school everyday; we kindly ask that you support your children with this at home by reminding them to put the book back in their folders after reading it.
Halloween!
We met with KG room parents to discuss the plans and activities for this Thursday. CAC will celebrate Halloween on campus by having students come to school wearing their costumes (this is optional), a special lunch, grade level celebrations with teachers and a Halloween parade at the end of the day. We would like to thank Yasmine, Candice and Shereen for their time and suggestions!
Here is some important information that we all want to share with KG parents, please take some time to read this thoroughly:
Costumes: students have the option of wearing their costume to school. We will have regular class from 7:55 to 11:00 am this means that students will be going to specials and recess before the celebrations. If your child’s costume is easy to take off and put on to go to the bathroom, then she/he will have no problem wearing it all day. You may want to have your child practice going to the bathroom wearing their costume if you decide they will wear it all day on Thursday.
Here are a few guidelines shared by the ES office regarding costumes:
- If you choose to come to school wearing your costume make sure you put make up, hairspray, etc… at home.
- Prop headwear (hats, caps, masks, etc.) may be worn, but not during class time
- Leave valuable items at home
- No dangerous props ( knives, swords, toy guns, etc.) or high heeled shoes
- Practice some of our core values
- Respect - commenting positively on other’s costumes
- Responsibility - for wearing costumes according to our guidelines
- Creativity - for creating and planning your costume
We will help students be ready before the photoshoot and activities. If you choose to not send your child wearing their costume, that’s also ok! You can send the costume in their backpacks and we will help him/her change in the classroom.
Class celebrations: room parents suggested that teachers ran all halloween activities. Each class will have different games and all students will rotate to have a chance to interact and enjoy all the fun games we’ve planned. Click here if you want to see the activities we will be doing.
Parade and dismissal: all parents are welcome to join our halloween parade from 2:30 to 3:00. Kindergarteners will sit and walk with their class. There will be many photo opportunities! Once the parade ends, Mrs. Jackson-Jin will dismiss PreK and KG students, we will walk students back to our classrooms to be dismissed from there. We kindly ask parents to wait for each classroom teacher to dismiss all students from each classroom, we will not dismiss students from the ES lawn. Our first priority is safety, and we truly appreciate your support on this matter!
If you have any questions, please ask your classroom parent. They’re happy to help out!
Learning In KG!
Reading Workshop
We are excited for another fun week of reading. Students are improving in their ability to choose “just-right books” and are steadily improving their reading stamina. More and more of them can be heard saying things like, “I can read that!” and “That word is easy for me now.” Nurturing this confidence will help to solidify this important reading identity.
This week in reading workshop students will be focusing on the first sound in a given word to help them read it. They are already able to use Picture Power to help solve unknown words, but sometimes that’s not enough. When readers also activate Sound Power, they can make doubly sure that the word they’re reading is the correct word. When they ask themselves, “Does it look right, sound right, and make sense too?” knowing the first sound will help them decode very tricky words!
Writing Workshop
This week, writers will be working hard on continuing to produce lots of true stories in our narrative unit. After receiving some exciting revision pens last week, students are now carefully looking back at old stories with an eye to make changes and additions. It is wonderful to see them confidently crossing out and adding on.
This week, our young writers will be busy doing the work of making their stories easier to read. One of the ways to do this is to make sure they are spelling “snap words” quickly and correctly every time so that they can get on with their writing. Snap words, like “I,” “the,” and “go,” will get easier and easier to write with more practice. Students will also be working closely with partners to coach each other to improve writing. Writing partners can help each other make sure stories make sense and make sure writing is easy to read.
Balanced Literacy
Throughout the week, kindergartners are part of several literacy moments that support reading, writing and phonemic awareness. Outside of the Reading and Writing Workshop, we have: Guided reading (small group reading instruction), Interactive Read Aloud, Shared Reading (with a big book), Shared Writing (teacher writes a story on a big paper, students suggest ideas) and Interactive Writing (teacher and students share the pen, see-saw writing).
These moments offer more opportunities to touch on strategies we teach students throughout the school year, reflect on teaching points from previous days, set the stage for future lessons, and collaborate with peers in the implementation on reading and writing skills.
Math
Mathematicians are having a blast exploring shapes! Last week they used different materials to make flat shapes, like the fun wikki sticks!
This week, they are exploring solid shapes! Kindergarteners will be learning the different attributes of cones, cubes, cylinders, and spheres. They will explore the round sides of these shapes as well as the faces (flat side of a solid) by describing, discussing and sorting these shapes by characteristic. Students will also continue to learn positional words: above, below, beside, in front of, next to, behind.
As part of our fluency games for each lesson, students continue working with the decompositions of 5 in a systematic way.
Social Studies
This week we will introduce the procedures for goal setting and reflection to all students. The plan stage will include conversations about things the students feel they have learned in kindergarten and things that they either want to learn or still have a hard time with. Students will practice with partners using sentence stems to express what areas they feel they are really good at and what areas they still need to work on.
Thank you for taking the time to read our KG newsletter!
Mr. Balazs
Ms. Ana
Ms. Paola
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