| From the Teacher's Desk | | Dear Parents, I hope that you and your families enjoyed a wonderful Spring Break. We still have so many things to learn before the school year ends. We are working to strengthen our letter formation and have been practicing in our D'Nealian workbooks. It is difficult to transition from what we do in our workbooks to our everyday writing. This month and next, we have many things going on for our families. In April, we have a field trip to the Museum and hopefully we can have many volunteers to chaperone that trip. In May, we have May Day, Kindergarten Art Gallery Day, Arts and Academics Night, Muffins for Moms and Donuts for Dads days. Before we know it, it will be June and I will be saying goodbye to my wonderful class and sending them on to First Grade! I want to thank all of you for your support this year as I worked with your child. It takes a village to raise a child and I am glad that I have had the opportunity to work with each of you. Sincerely,
Ellen Landriau
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| Language Arts | | This month's themes are “Down on the Farm" and "Spring is Here." The children will be building on letters and sounds that have been previously introduced, as well as learning new Alphafriends. Words with short -o- and short /e/ will be made and reviewed along with short -a- and short /i/ words. There will be new high frequency words learned. The children will continue to write sentences using high frequency words. We will continue to work to improve our reading skills through the use of high frequency and phonetic skills readers.
Comprehension is an essential part of reading, for decoding alone does not impart meaning to the reader. Therefore, comprehension skills such as predicting and inferring, summarizing, and evaluating are taught and reinforced daily. Children should practice predicting what will happen next, summarizing and retelling the story, and evaluating the actions and characters as they are read to by parents or siblings. Writing is an integral part of learning to read. The children write regularly in their journals and when creating a squiggle. Correct spelling is not important; rather deconstructing words, identifying the sounds, and writing the letters. Writing will help all children become better readers. We have introduced the use of a dictionary to help write words they need when journaling. We use My Word Book as an addition to our reading and writing curriculum.
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| Mathematics | | The children are learning basic concepts of subtraction. Included in this concept are subtracting one from a number, two from a number, recording and modeling subtraction, vertical and horizontal subtraction and facts through ten. The children will use pictures to model subtraction, record subtraction problems using numerals and symbols, relate addition to subtraction and subtract pennies. Following this unit, we will begin our study of Geometry and fractions.
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| Watching for the Leprechaun | |
The children learned about Ireland. We discovered what an island is and located Ireland on the world map. We learned the life story of Saint Patrick through stories and a video. We heard tales of the pesky leprechaun and saw the tricky things he did in our classroom. He took out all of the things he could find that were green and threw them around the room. He even left his footprints on our tables using green paint from our art center! Unfortunately, he left in a hurry and left behind his hat and his pot of gold lucky coins. We each got to keep a lucky coin. Ms. Landriau kept the leprechaun's hat under her own hat so that he would have to come back to get it and we could catch him. Somehow she forgot and took off her hat and the leprechaun came back when we weren't looking! The leprechaun hid 17 paper leprechauns. He left us a note saying that if we find them, one of them may just magically come to life. We trapped them in bags to take home just in case they did.
During math time, we mixed and measured to make vanilla pudding but when we stirred it in our cups somehow that tricky fellow made our pudding turn green. We got to eat green shamrock shaped Jello jigglers and had a taste of Irish soda bread with butter.
We made leprechauns from paper plates and photos of our faces. We wondered if maybe they came alive at night and played tricks in school. We also learned how to make a shamrock using three hearts. We each made a glittery shamrock to help decorate our room and lure the leprechaun in.
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| Dr. Seuss | | In honor of Dr. Seuss's birthday on March 2nd, and the week following, Kindergarten students listened to many of his stories. They learned that his name was Theodore Geisel and he was of German descent. When he chose the pen name of Dr. Seuss, he wanted it to be pronounced to rhyme with "voice." The name was Americanized and rhymes with "goose." Mr. Geisel agreed to that pronunciation, as Mother Goose was a well known children's story writer as well. We read some of his older stories. Bartholomew and the Oobleck was the first one we read. We followed that by making large containers of oobleck to play with. We also learned that oobleck is a non-Newtonian fluid as it sometimes acts as a liquid and others like a solid. When we read Bartholomew Cubbins and the 500 Hats, we created paper hats and feathers to wear. We, however, only had 17 hats, not 500. When we read Yertle the Turtle, we made turtles from paper plates and learned about turtle parts such as the carapace and the plastron. We then tried to stack all of our turtles and we successfully piled up 17, until someone's breath easily toppled the tower. We created imaginary animals in the style of Seuss when we read If I Ran the Zoo. The animals have been on display in the Library. All in all, the students enjoyed their study of Dr. Seuss.
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| | IMPORTANT! | | Looking ahead to First Grade, the Kindergarten children have homework Monday through Thursday. Please help your child complete the work and return it to school the next day. Homework should take no more than 15 minutes per night. Letter-sharing bags continue as homework each week. Please help your child find an object beginning with the weekly letter, think of some clues for the object and bring it to school for Friday morning sharing.
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| Reminder | | Children need SNEAKERS every day for safe play inside and outside. Every child needs a JACKET that is weather appropriate. We go outside unless it is raining or extremely cold. Please remember that the school playground is generally much colder and windier than other places. Please check your child's extra set of emergency clothing that is here at school to make sure that it is weather appropriate and will still fit them. Please be sure that there is an extra set of underclothing and socks as well.
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| Tentatively Scheduled Events | | Pencil these in….more info to follow…
April 14- Field Trip to National Gallery of Art April 21- 1:30 dismissal April 22- No school- Good Friday
May 6- May Day Celebration
May 13- Mothers’ breakfast May 20- Fathers’ breakfast May 24- Kindergarten Art Gallery
May 26- Arts and Academics Night
May 27- noon dismissal May 30- Memorial Day holiday- no school
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| Spanish | | We have been working hard getting to know your child and his or her strengths as well as areas of need. All second trimester topics continue to be reinforced during our third trimester. In addition, we will cover transportation during April. Please, your encouragement to make connections with Spanish language and culture is very valuable and helpful. Thank you.
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| Art | | In April, we will take a fun field trip to the National Gallery of Art to see if we can spot some of the artists we have learned about, such as Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso. We will also be doing artwork around the more unusual consonants- z, w, y, x, and j. For "z," we learned the words zoom, zap and zip and created a Zuperman who saved trees, didn't litter, and helped animals.
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| Music | | In Music Class, the Kindergarten students are listening to parts of two quintets: the finale of Dvorak's Piano Quintet in A Major Opus 81, and the third movement of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A Major. They are expanding their song repertoire by learning folk songs from a variety of cultures including Native American ("Long Wing Feathers") and French ("Savez-Vous Planter Les Choux?") and Spanish ("Uno, Dos, Tres, Chocolate!"). And for St. Patrick's Day, they are learning some fun Irish songs and rhymes and children's play-verse.
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| Physical Education | | Kindergarten has been hard at work in the gym the past month, learning and practicing their gymnastics skills. They have been flipping and rolling on the wedge mats, practicing different animal walks and crawls on the floor exercise, and staying on top of things on the balance beam! They even worked with the vault. | |
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