Kindergarten News

• Have your child bring their favorite kind of apple to school on Thursday (Sept. 12th), and label it with your child's name (you can use masking tape, a toothpick flag, etc.).
  
• Thank you to the parents who signed up to send items for our special apple projects this week! Please send those by Wednesday, September 11th.
• There is a "Sorting at Home" sheet in your child's TOYS folder today. This is due Wednesday.
• I am almost finished with beginning of year assessments. This takes me quite a while since they are given one-on-one! Be on the lookout for a sheet summarizing your child's beginning of year assessment results. It will probably be near the end of next week (depending upon when I finish assessments).
• September 13th: "Pep-gate" before the Greenwood soccer game, 5:00-6:30 (details are in the Greenwood newsletter this week)
• September 23rd: NO SCHOOL (Professional Learning day for teachers)
• September 30th-October 4th : Spirit Week (Details coming soon)
• October 4th is Greenwood Homecoming! They will have inflatables, food trucks, and lots of family fun at the tailgate before the game. I hope to see you there!
• Homecoming t-shirts are available to purchase through Booster Club. Click on the link below if you would like to order! There will be a spirit day where students can wear their Homecoming t-shirts if they have one.
• October 10th & 11th: NO SCHOOL (Fall Break)

Monday: Kace

Tuesday: Lena

Wednesday: Levi

Thursday: Maya

Friday: Miller

Here are some of the fun things we have planned for our "Apples" week:

• We will read non-fiction books about the life cycle of an apple, how apples are harvested, foods made with apples, the parts of an apple, and Johnny Appleseed.
• We will take a "virtual field trip" to an apple orchard and learn about how apples grow and how they are harvested.
• We will open an "Apple Orchard" for dramatic play during Centers. This will reinforce what we are learning about apples, as well as concepts related to sorting, following a "recipe," writing, money, etc.
• After reading the book, Ten Apples On Top, students will try to stack apples on their heads. We will discuss the question: Why are apples difficult to stack and balance? Students will then do a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Challenge. They will work in teams to find objects in the classroom that they can stack ten of without having the stack fall! We will discuss the attributes that make an object "stackable." What size, shape, etc. make an object good for stacking?
• Using the apples students bring from home, students will create an "Apple Investigations" book. They will measure their apples, weigh them, test them to see if they float or sink, etc. Our fourth grade reading buddies will help us with this project.
• We will talk about the sense of taste and then sample several different apple foods.

Here are some of the concepts and strategies we will be working on:

• Sight Word: the
• Looking at the picture and thinking about what makes sense
• One-to-one matching (pointing to each word as we read)
• Understanding that a period means a full stop
• Exploring characteristics that we often find in non-fiction books (headings, labels, diagrams, photographs, Table of Contents, etc.)
• Identifying what we have learned from a non-fiction book

We have worked hard at learning to work independently during Centers! Students are getting better every day at using the "Task Board" to know where to go, solving their own problems, and working well with their partners. I am proud of how well they are doing! I plan to start Guided Reading groups in a few weeks. All students will be in a small group (regardless of whether or not they are reading yet). For students who are not yet reading, we will work on pre-reading skills such as letters, sounds, and phonological awareness. The groups change frequently as students' needs change.

We will continue to write personal narratives. We will look at some wordless picture books by famous authors to see how the illustrations help tell the story. Then we will explore how to add more details to our own illustrations to show the reader more.

We will also work on "saying words slowly" and writing the sounds we hear. Some students are ready for this step in their writing; some are not, and that's okay! As students begin to write words, I encourage them to write the sounds they year. It's important to validate their efforts with this so they feel comfortable taking risks and trying words, even if they are not sure. Otherwise, students can become overly worried about spelling words correctly, and they will not even try unless they are sure they know how to spell it. Students will start to spell more words conventionally over time as they learn more sight words and spelling patterns.

We will work on identifying and writing: Aa, Mm, Ss, as well as the sounds those letters make.

Some of the phonological awareness skills we will work on are: isolating beginning sounds, isolating ending sounds, and recognizing pairs of rhyming words.

We work on a variety of different skills every day during calendar math, including rote counting, number sense, number recognition, patterns, weather, days of the week, months of the year, etc. Please help your child memorize his or her birthday. They should be able to tell someone the month and date (for example, "My birthday is April 3rd.").

Our goal next week is to sort and classify objects. Here are some of the ways we will work on this skill:

• We will talk about how objects are alike and different.
• We will sort various objects in the classroom by shape, color, size, number of sides, texture, and other attributes.
• I will sort students into groups in lots of different ways, and have them guess the sorting rule (ex: students wearing shoes that tie/ shoes that do not tie)
• We will sort the apples we brought from home and create a class graph

Kindergarten Instructor

Email: abbylowe@missouristate.edu
Location: Greenwood Laboratory School Missouri State, East Harrison Street, Springfield, MO, USA
Phone: 417-836-5620