Welcome to a fun new week!
We want to thank all parents for taking the time to read our weekly newsletters. If you have any feedback or comments, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you!
Here are a few announcements for this week:
Kenn Nesbitt Author Visit - November 7 to 9
Poet and performer Kenn Nesbitt will be visiting CAC from November 7 to 9. He will be presenting sessions with all the ES grade levels and with the MS language arts classes. He will present to the whole ES on Thursday, 7:55 am to 8:25 am, in the ES Hall. Parents are welcome! If you are interested in exploring his poems at home, his website is www.poetry4kids.com.
Last week for After School Activities Session 1
Session 1 ends on the week of November 5 - 9. All parents are most welcome to watch/join their
children’s last day/s of the activities during this last week. This does not apply to Production. If your child is in production, please review this link for the Production Timeline
Tuesday Assemblies and House Events
Every Tuesday, before going to assembly, kindergarteners leave their backpacks outside their classrooms and make their way to the ES Hall or to the place where the house event will take place. For those students that come a bit later, we are reminding them that they must walk to their classroom, drop their bags and meet us where we are. If we’re having an assembly in the hall, our aides will stay by the classroom until 7:55 to walk students who come then. If your child arrives after 7:55 we ask that you please help us by leaving their bags by the classroom, and walk them to the ES Hall. Thank you for your support!
Calling on guest readers!
Are you interested in coming to your child’s class to read a book? Then let us know! This week we’ll start having guest readers come in once a week. Each KG class will have a link for parents to sign up, we just ask that you please send us a quick email when you do. We will make sure every parent has a chance to come in!
Here is where you find our signup links:
Report Cards and Parent Teacher Conferences
Please click here to see a letter from the ES office regarding report cards and parent teacher conferences.
Learning This Week!
Reading Workshop
Readers are becoming true superheroes activating as many powers as they can to solve problems in their reading, it’s been such a fun unit! This week we will start a new part in the unit called “Bringing books to life”. Readers will be paying close attention to teachers voices during read aloud and how we make books sound like movies!
They will be studying the books they have in their book bags to think of different voices they could use to read them with excitement and other feelings. Using reader voices is a strategy that further develops fluency as a skill, and one thing readers will learn is that to read with fluency is to read books like we’ve always known them. This is why it is important for readers to reread books! Going back and rereading books is one more thing all readers do to become Super Readers!
Patterns are also important! As most of our kindergarteners are reading patterned books, they will learn that these patterns help them read with fluency as well. “Knowing the pattern helps you read words on every page, then you just have to activate powers to read the tricky ones!”
Writing Workshop
Our young writers have learned so much about crafting True Stories! Now armed with an array of writing tools that they can use independently, they are poised to publish a finished piece. This week, students will be taking a close look at the beginnings and endings of their stories with an eye for revision. They will look at the beginnings and endings in books by mentor authors like George McClements and will ask, “How can I make an amazing beginning?” and “How can I end my story with feelings?”
Kindergarten writers will review the revision process and how to use our blue revision pens to make changes and add more. There is so much that these students can do independently!
You can support this important work at home by continuing to talk about things that you have done together as a family, or by simply encouraging writing at home!
Math
The students will continue to learn about attributes for comparing length, weight, capacity, and numbers to 10 in Module 3. Last week students compared objects using the terms “longer than / shorter than” as well as “taller than / shorter than”. They will be using a linking cube stick this week as a unit of measurement to compare the length of different objects The mathematicians are learning about endpoints of an object as an important concept to measure. Something may look higher but is not necessarily taller!
Social Studies
Our “Little Me In a Big School” unit really gets going this week! After brainstorming about who we know at CAC and who we want to learn more about, kindergarten students will start to be visited by Mystery Guests from different divisions around the school. These CAC workers will share a bit about what they do to give students a sense of how much goes on at our amazing school. This week, we will be visited by teachers from the Elementary, Middle, and High School divisions of CAC.
As students begin to wonder more about our big school, we will guide them in forming interview questions to ask of CAC workers. What makes a good interview question? What do we want to know about them? What is the difference between a personal question and a question about work? We will be discussing all of these questions this week!
Circles
Students continue to learn about friendship in our circles. To reinforce the Core Value of compassion, we have planned circle activities to learn about friendship and empathy. Students will have opportunities to share about their ideas of having a friend by making these statements:
- With your partner, think of two places they would like to go with a friend they have.
- Stand and change seats if you have a friend in this classroom.
- Stand and change seats if you have a friend outside of this classroom.
Students have also an opportunity to complete the sentence:
“When people smile at us we feel…”
“We can tell someone is feeling sad by noticing…”
Some families may want to take this opportunity to share ways in which they show empathy as well.
Thanks again for all your help and support, and please don’t hesitate to email us with any questions or feedback.
Ms. Ana
Mr. Balazs
Ms. Paola
No comments:
Post a Comment