Kindergarten News

• Monday, September 2nd: NO SCHOOL (Labor Day)
• Your child is bringing home a sheet to practice writing their name the "kindergarten way," starting with a capital letter and the other letters lowercase. It is laminated so your child can use a dry-erase marker to practice repeatedly (I've included a marker). Please help your child practice this, following the arrows for the correct path of movement for the letters. Often when children do not form letters correctly, it's because they are not starting in the right place. Thank you for working on this at home!
• Next week we will continue sharing our "Me" Bags. I love hearing about all of the students' special interests and seeing them share with their friends. Please help your child practice speaking in a voice that is loud and clear.
• Each month your child will have a "Family Homework" project. The September family homework was sent home yesterday and is due next Friday.
• Our theme for the week of September 9th will be apples. We have lots of fun literacy, math, and science activities planned for that week (more details to come in next week's newsletter)! We are in need of a few items. Please click on the sign-up sheet below if you would like to send something. Thank you!
• All students will need to bring their favorite kind of apple to school on Thursday, September 12th.
• Scholastic book orders are due today. If you would like to order online, here is the web site. Our class code is VYBV4.
• There are lots of ways to get involved and stay informed at Greenwood! Be sure to download the Greenwood app and follow Greenwood on Facebook and Instagram. I also encourage you to become a member of the Greenwood Parent Association (GPA) if you haven't already.

Monday: NO SCHOOL

Tuesday: Evelyn

Wednesday: Fox

Thursday: Harper

Friday: Jackson

We will learn about ways we can be a good friend, how to treat others with kindness, and ways to resolve conflicts with peers appropriately.

We have been working hard at learning the procedures for our Literacy Centers! We are learning what to do at each Center, how to transition from one Center to the next, and how to solve our own problems during Centers. Once students have all of these procedures down and are self-regulated, I will start working with Guided Reading groups. The students are doing a great job! I am still doing one-on-one assessments with students and I hope to finish next week.

We will read Lunch, Friends Together, and Huggapotamus. Here are the concepts we will be working on:

• Sight word: like
• One-to-one matching (pointing to each word when reading)
• Understanding that words are made up of letters, and that authors leave spaces between words
• Making text-to-self connections

We will also practice "turning and talking" to a partner, being careful to speak so our partner can hear us, and looking at our partner when he or she is speaking.

We will continue writing personal narratives... true stories about our own lives! We talked about how good illustrators use colors that make sense, add details, and color neatly. We also started learning how to use letters or words to label things in our story. Most kindergarten students start writing stories by drawing pictures, then begin labeling things in their picture (starting with beginning and ending sounds), and eventually progress to writing words and sentences. Next week we will learn that authors are never finished, and we will learn what to do when we "think" we have finished, by adding details to our pictures, adding to the words, or starting a new piece of writing.

Here are the concepts we are working on:

• We will learn about "superhero vowels." We call them superheroes because they make two sounds.
• We will continue learning to make the basic handwriting strokes correctly (straight, slant, curve, circle, etc.).

We will also begin learning to identify letters and sounds, starting with letters "a" and "m." You might be wondering, why are we learning the letters out of order? We are learning the letters in an intentional sequence. We start with letters that occur frequently in small words so that students can learn to make and read some words quickly. We learn short vowels before long vowels since they are more common in simple words, and letters that are visually similar (like "b" and "d") are taught separately to avoid confusion.

Our goal next week is to identify, write, and represent numbers 0-10.

We will practice numbers 1-10 by playing several games, as well as some fun Cooperative Learning activities! Being able to recognize and represent these quantities quickly is important in building number sense, and the ability to do math mentally. We will also continue to practice writing numbers 1-10 with correct formation. Check out the video below for some practice with subitizing 1-10! You may notice that subitizing 6-10 is a lot more challenging for your child than subitizing 1-5. It takes lots of practice and develops gradually over time.

Kindergarten Instructor

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