CRAZY BUSY WEEK!!!!

Well…I hope my kindergarten friends are ready for a wild, crazy, fun week in kindergarten!!! Of course, we will be learning lots of stuff and we will be getting ready for our holiday program on Friday!!

In literacy we will be starting a brand new unit called “Wonders of Nature.” Our theme this week will be “Watch It Grow!” Our essential question will be “What do living things need to grow?” I know it is a silly time of year to be talking about this…but we will be learning more about this in the spring!! We will be singing the song “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” The stories we will be looking at are called, “ My Garden” and “Growing Plants.” We will also be looking at some poetry….can you believe we do that in kindergarten?! As we read we will continue to look at the concepts of print, genre, and we will start to talk about the reading strategy of rereading.  We will continue to blend words and we will be using this strategy as we read “Hop Can Hop” from our crabby books. We will continue to learn about the letter ‘H’ and we will be sorting lots of picture cards and trying to decide what they start with!! This is so easy for us now:) Can you see we have a lot to do!?!

In writing we will continue to write stories from our lives. We are working super hard on sounding out words and using adjectives when we write!! This week we will be talking about pattern books and we will even try to make a few class pattern books!! In grammar we start to learn about pronouns! Crazy!!!

In math we continue to learn about teen numbers and the number of tens and ones each teen number has!! We are recognizing and writing numbers 1-20….this can be tricky!! Some of us like to get the ones place and tens place mixed around. We will also be looking at shapes and practicing sorting them by their attributes.

In unit studies we will finish up talking about Holidays Around the World and we will be doing lots of projects!!!! We are so happy to complete our passports and show you all of the great things we’ve done and learned about in our suitcases.

Of course, Twinkle will continue to watch us this week. He was so nice to bring us donuts last week!! Please remember our Holiday program will be Friday at 12:30 in the auditorium. This should last until about 1:00. Please bring your families so they can see all of the work we have been doing!!

Also, this week we will be giving lots of assessments to close out the 2^nd quarter. Please make sure your child is rested and has ate a great breakfast!! I want them to be fully ready to show me how super smart they are!!

I think that’s all!! I hope you have a great week before our winter break!!

Love-Mrs. Schroeder

Twinkle the Elf!!

Twinkle surprised us yesterday with supplies to make a snowman donut!! Of course, he broke into the donuts and had a few himself:) Silly Elf!! Enjoy our short video of our donut adventure!!!

Happy Birthday Aydin!!!

We celebrated the half birthday of Aydin today!!! We had so much fun and Twinkle had so much fun hiding in donuts!! Aydin spoiled us with oatmeal cookies...we hope you had a good half birthday:)

Birthday girl with her sign!!

With her friends!!

There is Twinkle!!!

Rock Star Havannah!!

Havannah was our rock star last week and we had a great week with her!! She loves the color yellow and her favorite book is Green Eggs & Ham!  The movie she just loves to watch is Finding Nemo and her favorite sport is soccer. She LOVES mac & cheese (who doesn't :)) Her favorite animal is a dolphin and she loves Hunter Hayes song "Wanted." When she grows up she wants to be a doctor and if she could go anywhere in the world it is Chuckie Cheese. She is a super special kid because she loves her family!!

Thanks for being such a rock star Havannah!! We are lucky to have you in our class. Please enjoy our video!!

Birthday Girl Genesis!!

Genesis celebrated her birthday last week and we had a GREAT time!! Twinkle the Elf came in his birthday outfit and made a Christmas Tree!! We were even LUCKY enough to get some delicious cookies!! We hope your day was great Genesis!!

Birthday Girl!!

With the class!!

It's Twinkle!!

Cookies!!

BUSY WEEK!!!

So as I am sure you all know our elf, Twinkle, came last week to keep an eye on us during the holiday season and has been moving around our room since he arrived in his makeshift hot air balloon! Twinkle even left us a poster with Santa’s Tips for staying on the nice! Unfortunately Twinkle left our classroom on Friday because someone touched him and we were all super sad and a little nervous because we are hoping he comes back. I just know that this week we are all going to be trying very hard to stay on the nice list! Here is a picture of the poster he left in our room.

In Unit Studies we will finish up our Around the World book and will be packing/making a suitcase and getting a passport so we can start traveling the world to learn about more cultures and their celebrations. We will be traveling after our afternoon recess to different countries/classrooms and learning about celebrations people have in Africa, Israel, Holland, and Germany. We will be learning about Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, the wooden shoe, and the Christmas tree. It is going to be a super fun week of learning about different cultures – we will also learn some songs and will start practicing for our program that is Friday, Dec. 19^th at 12:30 in the auditorium! We hope you are all able to come!

In Math we will be continuing to talk about teen numbers and seeing the group of ten and ones. We will also be looking at different attribute cards (which is a fancy name for shapes) and will be exploring with them to sort them by color, shape, and size and we will make patterns with them too! We will also be learning about the equals and not equals signs and comparing numbers. We will continue to tell and solve more story problems and a great time to practice story problems at home is during dinner – for example you could say “we had 6 rolls on the plate and we ate 3 of them, how many do we have left?” or “I ate 3 chicken nuggets and then had 2 more, how many chicken nuggets did I have altogether?” or you can even ask your child if they can come up with a problem of their own.

During Literacy our essential question this week is “How can people help to make your community better” which is a wonderful topic to discuss and I am excited to hear the conversations we will have this week about pitching in and making our community the best that it can be! We will be reading the following stories – “Roadwork”, “A Community Garden”, and “The Bundle of Sticks”. In our crabby books we will be reading “I Can You Can” and in guided reading your child will either read “Can you Fix It” or “We Clean”. Our vocabulary words are community, improve, confused, harvest, and quarrel. Again this week we will be focusing on those key details of the story and answering and asking questions when we read. This is actually a review week and next week we are suppose to learn the word “my” and focus in on the letter H but we will be switching those around because next week will be a little crazy with our program so this week we will learn about “my” and “h”! I will also be assessing quite a bit this week for report cards! Always so much to do!

It is sure to be a fast and fun week again in Kindergarten! I hope that Twinkle has nothing but good news to report!

Birthday Boy Kaden

We celebrated Kaden's birthday back in October when I was gone...so I am behind getting this up on our blog!! I hope I can keep up now that I am back in the swing of things!!! I hope that Kaden had a GREAT birthday this year!!

Holiday Time!!!

I hope that you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving and my friends had a good break. I also hope that they are ready to get back to school and are ready for a fun, fast 14 days! We will be doing a lot over the next 3 weeks and we don't have any time to waste!
I am thinking that one of Santa's scout elves will probably be coming to keep an eye on us during this crazy time to make sure we all stay on the nice list! Our elf, Charlie, came to my house this past weekend to keep on eye on Jackson and Presley so I am sure Twinkle will be arriving any day now to keep watch over my friends while they are here at school! I am crossing my fingers for excellent behavior because like I said we have lots to do!

In Literacy we will be focusing on the letter d and the word "do". Our vocabulary words are appreciate, culture, prefer, proud, and tradition. We will be reading "What Can You Do With a Paleta?", "Cultural Festivals", "A World of Festivals", and in our crabby books we will read "Sid" and in guided reading your child will read either "Neighborhood Party" or "Parade Day". If we can squeeze in any holiday books we will be doing that too! We will work on our comprehension skills as well when we are reading stories and will be talking about the character, setting, and the events that take place throughout the book. We will be blending and segmenting words and also reading silly/nonsense words this week to get ready for our Quarter 2 assessments!

In writing we will be continuing to learn more about what good writer's do - the CAPS man really helps us remember that every sentence starts with a Capital letter, we need Art work to match our story, also Punctuation marks go at the end of every sentence, and between every word we need Spaces! We will also be starting to talk about pattern books and will be making a few of our own class pattern books over the next few weeks!

In math we will be working hard on learning those teen numbers, we are going to practice solving and telling oral story problems and again reviewing the different strategies we can use to solve story problems. We will be exploring with a balance to compare how much things weigh and we will be using vertical and horizontal graphs to show our results! We will also be talking a lot about number partners and working on our counting mats!

In Unit Studies we are starting one of my favorite units (I know that I say that about all of the units but this one really is a good one) we will start learning about Holidays Around the World. It is so neat to talk about our own family traditions around the holidays but also so neat to talk about how different cultures celebrate. We will be making a booklet and talking about what we might see if we were to actually travel around the world! It is sure to be a fun busy week!

Please make sure you are free to come to our Holidays Around the World Program on Friday, Dec. 19th at 12:30 in the auditorium. You will be getting an invitation soon but wanted to give you a heads up that it will probably last around 30 minutes. I hope that you are all able to make it!

I can't believe it is December and we are almost done with the second quarter of kindergarten!