Kindergarten Newsletter

October 14th - October 18th

Well, here is to the middle of October. It’s wild at how fast this year is going.  We will continue working through our ABC’s. We have a couple of people that are close to mastery but that typically take at least until Christmas at the soonest. When I say mastery, I mean can fluently give the letter and the sound with no hesitation. This makes reading words much easier. It’s important to not skip this step. I have also made the executive discussion (haha- that made me giggle) to pump the brakes a little on the sight words. We are doing a fantastic job but I want to be sure that we are not getting in over our head. I’ll wait a couple of weeks before we add more to our list. J K5 children, on average, are to know around 50 sight words by the end of the year and we are well on our way already. We will also keep working through our handwriting and sentence writing. They thought they were big! We are also going to start working on something called onset and rime. This is where I give them a word like cat and they give to break it up into the beginning sound and then the rest and vise versa. Ex: c-at , b-at.  This sounds very easy but it is not for our little ones. They catch on quickly though. It’s one of the first steps in reading words. We will keep working on beginning sounds and add on ending sounds too. We will also start decoding and blending cvc words a little bit. That sounds foreign, I know. Decoding means to take it apart sound by sound and then we blend it back together. CVC means consonant, vowel, consonant words (bug, cat, dog, etc). We’ll keep working through our math numbers to 10 and begin our pumpkin investigations too. I will send home the checks that I did. Please remember that if you see a low percentage do not panic. The percentage lets me know how and when to back up and punt. Now, if the percentages do not grow that is when we need to start panic. I’ll let you know if I am worried though!! 

•Sight Words:

•red, orange, yellow, the, a, green, blue, is, go, purple, pink, white, black, had, I , see, brown, he, and, gray, has, you, we, of, am, it

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•Letters/Sounds/Writing A-Z, rhyming words, differentiate between a letter, words, sentence, small/tall/fall letters, beginning sounds 

•Numbers 0-10 : id, writing, before/after, making 10

•Upcoming Events:

•10/17: LSC Fall Festival 5p-7p

•10/18: Wear CAMO!

•10/18: $1 for ice cream

•10/18: $8 due for pumpkin patch

•10/21: Picture retakes

•10/22: Picture orders due

•10/25: Wear HAWAIIAN!

•10/25: $1 for ice cream

•10/30: National Candy Corn Day!!!

•10/31: Raines’ 6th Birthday!!!

•10/31: Halloween!!!!! – Halloween Party at Backyard Orchards

•11/1: dress like a Hippie!

•11/5: National Donut Day!!!

•11/7: Harper Lee’s 6th Birthday!!!

•11/11: No School

•11/14: National Pickle Day!!!

•Reminders:

•Don’t forget to be collecting box tops! Box tops=free money for LSC!!

•PLEASE don’t forget drinks in your kiddos lunchboxes to have a lunch time.

•If you have any gently loved uniforms that you’d like to get rid of please consider donating to the school. We have a $5 spot where anyone can come and purchase uniforms! 

•Idea: Send a thermos of water for the playground. It helps to have a bottle to bring out to the playground during these HOT days!

•Don’t forget to send nap mats back after we wash! J

•Please sign and return those “sign and return” papers asap. I use these to guide instruction and would love to have them back. If you want/need a copy let me know! I’ll be glad to send one! J

•Secret Tips:

•Don’t forget to be working with your toolkit! Especially those sight words!

•Let your child explore all different types of text. Expose them to books, magazines, comics, newspapers, and much more. They LOVE finding words that they are learning. It also gives them an idea of all of the different types of texts available!

•When reading at night ask you kiddo about the story along with questions about the text features.

•The front and back of the book, the title, the author and illustrator, the spine, where to start reading and where to stop!  It’s a fun and easy way for them to be able to start recognizing these important skills. 

Here are a few questions that you can ask when reading at home:

•What do you think will happen in the story?            What might be the problem?        Where is the setting?

•What do you think will happen next?           What can you tell me about the story so far?   

• •Why do you think the characters acted a certain way?       What was your favorite/least favorite parts?