Jan 29-Feb 2

Yikes!  How is it almost February already?!  February brings some exciting events in Kindergarten!  We will celebrate Valentine's Day and the 100th day of school.  We will exchange valentine cards with the class!  Here is a list of student names if you'd like to get started early!  I'll be sending a hard copy of this list home soon as well!   Be on the look out for 100 day information to come home soon too!

Important Dates and Reminders:

Feb. 12th: 100th Day of School

Feb. 14th:  Pink, White and Red Day 

Feb 16th: Funky Friday 

February 22nd  and 23rd: NO SCHOOL 

Here is a peek at the week:

Math: This week in math we will continue to solidify our understating of teen numbers and the equations and quantities that represent them.  We will be matching equations to representations of teen numbers and work to understand that the extra ones that join with ten are always the second digit displayed in a teen number.  It is common error for kindergarten students to write 71 for 17.  We will also work with partners of numbers and will play a game called missing partner.  This will help us to visualize how quantities combine to make a larger numbers.  This is something that could be played at home with coins or any small plastic object.  The goal is to display a set of objects and then cover part of that set and for students to be able to say what they see and say what is missing to make the total number of objects.  For example: "I see 4, one is missing, 4 and 1 make 5."

Reading: We have been loving digging into non-fiction books and showing and sharing our thinking with our reading partners and playdate groups.  Check us out adding post-its to our books!

This week we will continue with some non-fiction work and will meet in topic clubs to do more talking about and comparing books.  We will also take some time to become avid readers of poetry.  This will really help us to read more smoothly and to really understand what feelings poems are conveying.  

Writing: We will give our how to writing a jump start this week by working to write procedural books about this we do throughout the school day.  Since our daily routines can be easily transferred into a series of steps this will  be a chance for us to get some new pieces of writing done quickly while trying out some of our new writing 'moves.' We will also  add introductions and conclusions to our how to books.  We will also learn to use comparisons in our writing to give more specific directions.  

Science:  Well, our room has now become a plant and animal habit.  Our lima bean and alfalfa plants are growing more each day and we have three new fish: Cupcake, Fluffy and Flash Hermine.  We also have a colony of beetles for us to observe.  This week we will make further observations of our growing plants and will also begin to study how people can have an effect on the environment as a whole and also on animal habitats.  This will bring up the topics of reusing and recycling.  

Fundations: We will focus on new snap words this week:  get, big, little, not, away. As we work to improve our spelling, we have really been paying attention to the vowels sounds we hear in words.  The students have realized that some of the vowels have similar sounds so this can be tricky.  We are also learning as writers it is ok to go back and fix up vowel sounds that we have forgotten our used incorrectly.  We have been using a vowel chart similar to this to check our use of vowels in reading and writing!