Sunday, September 9, 2012

Week 3 Class of 2025


This Week in

KINDERGARTEN

 

September 10th, 2012

Dear Kindergarten Families,

            As we head into our first full week of school we continue to develop our classroom routines, class rules, jobs, and building our classroom of new friends into a community.
During our math center this week we will begin to discuss and practice number formation by learning a poem that teaches us the correct formation of the numbers 1 – 10.  We will also work on sorting and exploring our math manipulatives that we will be using over the course of this year.
Over the course of this week we will be brainstorming classroom rules so that we all feel safe in kindergarten and have a fun, successful learning environment.  The students will list many rules and then decide what rules they think are important to have, narrowing it down to about five core rules.  We will end our week by signing a classroom constitution that lists these agreed upon rules.  It will be display at the front of our classroom.  It is a critical part of our Responsive Classroom curriculum that the students choose their own rules, as it leads to a deeper level of understanding and ownership. 
We will read Wemberly Worried, a book about a mouse starting school.  We will be talking about our hopes and dreams for kindergarten.  Students then will make a small paper quilt square illustrating one of their hopes or dreams for kindergarten.  These will be displayed in the classroom as a class quilt.
Part of our day in kindergarten is set up in reading literacy centers that your children rotate through.  We began to explore how this works last week.  Our class literacy centers focus on Art, ABC’s, Vocabulary, Writing.  Moving through work centers is challenging at first, but builds great independence and a child’s ability to work on task.
For writing we will be working with our names a great deal. At the first ABC work center we will practice printing all upper and lowercase letters to see what we know.  We will end our ABC centers by exploring some of the tools that we will be using with our handwriting program, such as small chalkboards to write our letters on. 
Other activities this week… Within writer’s workshop we are going to be using flip books that will teach us how to draw everyday objects like houses, cars, people, trees.  We will be doing this work within our very own sketchbooks.  We will make name puzzles; I encourage you to have your child build this with you when they bring them home.  We will also begin our phonics program: Lively Letters.  This is an amazing program that gets the kids singing, moving, and learning mnemonic devices to connect the letter shape and sound to a story.  I love it and the kids will too.
*Curriculum night for parents is Tuesday the 11th at 6:15. I am excited to see you all there.
*Please send in water bottles labeled, to keep in the classroom for the children to drink from.
*If you are not able to receive school or district news via email please send in a note so I can make sure you receive a paper copy.
*Beal Child Safe line if you’ll child is late or absent- 508-841-8860
*Visit our blog krm5.blogspot.com

                                                                                                -  Mrs.Taylor
Scholastic Book Order Click Here to order books due by 9/21/12

Monday, September 3, 2012

Week 2 of the class of 2025


Dear Kindergarten Families,
I hope that you all had a wonderful long weekend and welcome back!  This week we will continue to build a comfortable and safe classroom community and learn our new friends’ names.  We will learn about our classroom and develop our class routines.  We will practice fire drills so that we are ready for the real drill.  As part of our “Responsive Classroom” curriculum it is critical to build a strong classroom community to ensure that we have a successful learning environment.
We will begin to work with one to one correspondence, explore our names, and build our classroom word wall.  We will also discuss our hopes and dreams for kindergarten, and make a quilt of these dreams through our words and pictures.
Our star books this week that we will be reading are Wemberly Worried, Is This My Classroom, and Chrysanthemum
Reminder: If you ever need to communicate with me about anything my school e-mail is dtaylor@shrewsbury.k12.ma.us.   Also feel free to send in notes inside your child’s home/school communication folder.  We check these as your children arrive at school and then they bring all of their mail home to you in this folder.  This week your child will bring home their first scholastic book order… check it out!
Have a wonderful week!        ~ Mrs. Taylor


Upcoming Events:
Curriculum Night September 11, 2012
6:15-7:15 This is for parents only, please arrange for care of your children. *Make it a night out! *

Fun website to check out: www.starfall.com
Good practice of the alphabet, numbers, shapes and colors.