I hope everyone had a wonderful long weekend! A friendly reminder that class is back in session tomorrow, Tuesday, January 17th. I'm looking forward to seeing all my Kindergarten friends!
Important Dates:
January 20th:
Emmanuel Day
See Details Below
Announcements:
Emmanuel Day
This Friday, January 20th will be "Emmanuel Day" at Boyden School. Emmanuel Urrea is a kindergarten student in Mrs. Fields’ class. Before arriving at Boyden, Emmanuel was diagnosed with cancer. He went through a series of successful treatments and had been in remission. Unfortunately, Emmanuel's cancer has returned and he has been going through a series of intensive treatments that have prevented him from being in school on a regular basis. We are asking that on January 20th, the students and staff wear GREEN (one of his favorite colors) to school to support Emmanuel. Emmanuel will be visiting Boyden that day and what is extra special is that January 20th is also Emmanuel's 6th birthday.
As part of "Emmanuel Day" the Kindergarten classes will be invited to participate in Friday's school store (school store is normally for students in grades 1-5). Also, ALL of the proceeds from the School Store that day will be going directly to Emmanuel's family. If your child does not want anything from the School Store but still wants to donate...no problem! We will have a container in the front lobby for students to donate. This is a day for the Boyden School to show their support for Emmanuel and his family. Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have any questions!
Quiet Time
Over the past several weeks we have restructured how Quiet Time looks in our classroom. While this is still a quiet, relaxing time where students adjust back to the classroom after lunch and prepare for the busy afternoon, more options such as drawing, puzzles, and finishing work at the tables has also been included during this time. As a result, many students have not been using their quiet time towels as often. Starting this week, Quiet Time towels will now be optional in our classroom. Students who do choose to bring a towel to school will still have it returned home on Friday for washing.
Curriculum Update:
Fundations
Last week in Fundations we practiced reading the sight word can. We also continued to practice our "tapping" skills and became more comfortable with applying them to various CVC words. Additionally, we began to review how we write our uppercase letters. While we spent an entire week learning how to write each lowercase letter at the beginning of the year, our uppercase review is moving MUCH quicker, and we are practicing how to write two letters each day!
Last week our class reviewed the sight word an, and learned that this little word can be found inside many bigger words! We took the time to brainstorm bigger words with the word "an" such as fan, man, ban, and tan, and learned that all of these words (and many more!) belong to what we call a word family! The class then practiced reading words in the "an" word family as they created their own an vans during center time.
Reader's Workshop
We continued to practice applying our reading superpowers to new stories last week in Reader's Workshop! We also added two new superpowers, thinking power and fix it power. Thinking power encourages students to not just read the words on each page of a book, but to make predictions, comments on what they notice, and make connections. Fix it power requires students to monitor their reading and go back to "fix it" when their reading doesn't sound right, look right, or make sense.
The students above practice applying their reading superpowers as they partner read!
Writer's Workshop
Last week in Writer's Workshop the student's continued to work on their personal narrative/true stories. They learned that writers make their books "readable" by remembering to include finger spaces and as many letters as possible in the words that they write. We have also been exploring other conventions of sentence writing such as beginning each sentence with a capital letter and ending with a punctuation mark.
Math
It was an exciting time in math last week as we began to explore number lines! We learned that numbers on a number line must appear in sequential order, and played many fun games that helped us practice this skill.
On Friday, we welcomed Boyden's math coach, Mrs. Rinaldi, into our classroom as she introduced January's ST Math incentive known as the Winter Waddle! Over the next few weeks we will monitoring our class' ST Math participation percentage, and recording it on our class chart in the hopes of winning various prizes! While your child is welcome to do ST Math at home, please know that this is completely optional as ample time will be provided at school for them to meet their weekly goal.
The class got to vote on which JiJi we wanted to put on our poster! We voted to use the birthday JiJi for the next few weeks.
Thanks so much for taking a peek at our week! Please check back soon to watch us learn, grow, and play in the wonderful world that is K!
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