Mrs. Guerrero and Mrs. Burns – Kindergarten

We want to thank all of the Kindergarten families for their hard work and time in preparing for the Halloween Carnival.  The children had a wonderful time!  The children also enjoyed our field trip to the Native Lands at Green Meadows.  The children experienced animals from the land, saw falcons and hawks sweep over their heads, learned about music and dance from Native Americans and Africa.  The kids had a great time and we truly appreciate all of your help on the field trip!  This is what we will be doing this month:

Religion – We will learn about the saints and make a book about them.  We will also discuss what we are thankful for in our lives.

Language Arts – We will complete our unit on Shadows and move on to our next unit, Finding Friends.  Students will use pictures, print, and people to gather information about friendship, identify similarities and differences in literary elements (characters, problems, theme), retell and summarize stories, and regularly read picture stories in groups and independently.  We will learn about the following letters: Ss, Mm, Dd, Aa, Hh, Tt, and Oo.  We will work in our Handwriting Without Tears book on these letters.  We will also continue to work in our SRA Open Court book on segmenting letters, sounding out words, letter sounds, reading decodable books, spelling words, and reviewing our tricky (sight) words. The kids are also enjoying working on letter mats on placing letters in alphabetical order, playing games with letters such as “Simon Says”, echoing letter sounds, and finding missing letters.

Math – We will work on numbers 0 – 20 – identifying numerals, rote and rational count to 20, trace and write to 20, and ordering numerals.  The children will identify a penny and dime and learn the value of each coin.  We have been working with ten sticks and cubes to understand the place value of numerals 0 – 20 and your kids are doing a great job! We will work with these shapes: rectangle, oval, and triangle.  Every 5 lessons, we work on a problem solving activity which involves graphing.  We will learn vocabulary for next, after, last, first, second, third, plus, equal, and add.

Social Studies – We will learn about the First Thanksgiving.  On the week of Nov. 9, we will learn about pilgrims and their way of life.  On the week of Nov. 16, we will learn about the Native Americans.  Parents, please send 1 large brown paper grocery sack.  The children will be making Indian vests.  We need these bags on or before Thursday, November 8.  Thank you!  We will have a Thanksgiving feast on Tuesday, Nov. 24.  You will receive a letter asking you to bring one item for the feast.  We will be making friendship soup!

Science – We will continue to graph our daily weather and discover objects in our Can you Guess? box.  We will also conduct various experiments related to our letters we are learning about.

Have a great month!