Jan. 9-12

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a wonderful winter break!  The two weeks off were filled with family, fun, and rest!  I was geared up to start the new year with my kindergarten friends!  We are off to a great start!  The children seem to return from break more mature and ready to take on the challenge of becoming prepared for first grade. The kids were excited to see the new arrangement of our classroom.  Each table is working hard to earn the most tallies so they can have beanie baby friends keep them company on their desks on Fridays! 

January brings BIG changes in Kindergarten.  During the first few weeks back we will spend a good amount of time assessing the children as we prepare for report cards and begin to change up our flex groups. Each child will be assessed for their 2nd quarter math skills as well as on our Kindergarten sight words. Students will also take our winter CBM tests. In order to do these assessments, the children may be doing more seat work or independent reading/writing for a few days. But once we get our new scores, it will be full speed ahead! When we pull all this information together, we will look at what your child's needs are. We will place them in a flex group that works on the skills they need to build upon or that provides them with enrichment. We will also begin to differentiate within the classroom more during centers and writers workshop. We strive to provide the very best education for each and every one of our May Watts kids.

This week we focused on the letter F and sight words "yes" and "play."  We read non-fiction books and articles about frogs and wrote wonderful fact pages about what we learned and discussed.  We began making books in writer's workshop.  Everyone was so excited!  We will share our books every once and a while in class.  The kids will get great ideas from each other!  After sharing the writer's workshop items will come home for you to celebrate your child's writing.

This week and next week we will talk about empathy.  Understanding how others feel helps us make better choices.  Empathy is a tricky concept for kindergartners, but if they think about how THEY would feel if a situation happened to them, it helps put things into perspective. 

Literacy Centers began this week.  A big thanks to Eden, Elsie, and Molly's mom and Kevin's dad for leading the small groups.  Each group will spend half the time playing a language arts skill game and the other half practicing a math concept.  Everyone had a fun time.  Please consider signing up.  It's easy to lead a group and the kids love having you in the classroom!

We practiced probability, counting by 10's, and counting backward this week.  We will continue the math wall next week reinforcing number sense concepts.

I sent home the Scholastic book order forms for January but feel free to order online for any month available.  Please have the orders in by January 27th.

Please open the attachment to my latest Blog update email.  It has the details for this year's Open House which is Tuesday January 31st.

Please make sure boots and snow pants are labeled and PLEASE have your child practice dressing independently!  What a big help that will be.  Thank you!

Have a great weekend!  Enjoy the snow!