Wednesday October 27th, 2010

We finished our pumpkin unit this Monday with a Pumpkin Party!  We carved a pumpkin, scooped the seeds and counted them.  As a class, the students decided what type of face to carve into our Jack-O-Lantern and helped to sketch the model.  We also sampled baked pumpkin seeds and pumpkin muffins.  If you are interested in the recipe for these (completely nut-free!) muffins, I will be posting it as soon as I can find where I put it.

This week we will be doing a unit on bats and echolocation.  We will be including what bats eat, where they live and how they use echolocation in their everyday lives.  We read the book, Stella Luna by Janell Cannon, and talked about fiction versus non-fiction.  The students loved comparing bats with birds and talking animals with non-talking animals.  Also this week we are focusing on numbers 6,7, 8 and 9 in math and have started multiple page booklets in Writer's Workshop.  It has been challenging stretching our stories out, but so far we love writing books instead of summaries. 

On Friday, Kindergarten will be celebrating Halloween with a Halloween parade in the morning (please come, all parents are invited!) and a short party in the afternoon.  Students are invited to wear their costumes to school (please change at home) without masks or weapons.  I can't wait to see all the costumes!  So far Miss Cahill and Miss Danielle have both managed to keep their costumes a secret...

Important Date
October 29th:  OSM Halloween/ End of the First Quarter
November 1st:  All Saints' Day Liturgy 9:30AM
November 7th:  Family Mass 8:30AM
November 12th:  11:30 Dismissal for all, Parent-Teacher Conferences

Requests
We are in need of the following items...
- glue sticks
- disinfecting wipes

Friday October 15th, 2010

REMINDER

This year in Kindergarten we are fortunate enough to have both a snacktime and a lunchtime.  Different from preschool, in Kindergarten students are responsible for providing his or her own snack.  As much as we all would love to have cookies and fruit snacks each day for snack, unfortunately those are not part of the school recommended snacks.  Here is a list (taken from the handbook) of healthy snack examples:

Fruit
Graham crackers
Pretzels
Raisins
Cheese and Crackers
Celery and Peanut Butter/Cheese
Goldfish
Yogurt

Thanks for all your help in this matter!

Thursday October 14th, 2010

Happy Pumpkin Week!  This week and next we will be using our Pumpkin Unit to talk about fall, seasons, measurement, poetry, counting, color mixing and the growing cycle.  We have also been busy learning about syllables.  This is a difficult concept so feel free to practice at home with your child.  In Math we have been working with the numbers zero through five.  This may sound simple, but it's the foundation for counting.  As a part of this topic we also spend time making the different numbers.  This is very imporant for knowing that if you have 3 apples and then finding 2 more gives you 5 apples all together is the very beginning stages of addition and subtraction.

Requests
-  We are in need of a few items, if you can help us out we would really appreciate it:
    -  Old Magazines (we use these a lot to search for words and letters)
    -  Disinfecting wipes

Important Dates
October 15th:  Scholastic Orders Due
October 20th:  Picture Day
October 29th:  School Halloween Celebration

Monday October 4th, 2010

It's a brand new month...and BRRRR it's getting cold out there.  Make sure that you send your child to school each day with appropriate outdoor gear.  We use our outdoor space at every opportunity and I'd hate for anyone to be cold.

We finished up our Apple Unit last week with an apple-tastic Friday!  We had an apple taste test and we made our very own applesauce!  Our apple taste test helped us get started on the very important concept of graphing; which we will continue using throughout the year.  In case you're wondering, yellow apples won!

This week we started talking about our Five Senses.  Monday afternoon we came up with a set of questions that we would like to answer by the end of the week.  An example of a question we asked is: "How do I taste things?"  By Friday, students will learn the answers to these questions through different science centers and exploratory activities.

We are also continuing our study of rhyming this week.  Our biggest obstacle so far is distinguishing words that rhyme with each other from words that have the same beginning sound.  Looking at the middle and ending sounds is new for Kindergarteners, but we will continue practicing!  Feel free to practice rhyming with your child at home as well.

Celebrity Reader Schedule:

October 8th:  Celia Madera
October 15th:  Sam Kelly
October 22nd:  Jennifer Murphy
November 5th:  Lori Fanning
November 19th:  Jenny McGinn
December 10th:  Matt Broderick