Feb 12-16

Well, after school on Monday your child will officially be 100 days smarter!  We will have a fun day together and will have more fun and excitement with Valentine's Day on Wednesday!  I just don't know how Kindergarten could get more exciting!

Important Dates and Reminders:

Feb. 12th: 100th Day of School- Dress like you are 100 years old

Feb. 14th:  Pink, White and Red Day and Valentine exchange at school 

Feb 16th: Funky Friday

February 22nd  and 23rd: NO SCHOOL
February 27th: Family Night 5:30- Music and Masterpieces 

Math: This week we will begin Unit 4.  The main concepts of this unit are finding partner numbers for 6-10 and identifying 3 dimensional shapes.  The unit also reinforces teen number composition and decomposition.  Please note that any partner work within 6-10 is expected to be done with math tools and drawings and students are by no means expected to be fluent in knowing their facts or partners to 10.  We will continue to work toward automaticity with addition and subtraction within 5.  Did you know there are 21 addition facts from 0-5 that students need to be automatic with?!

Reading:This week we kick off a new reading unit called Growing Expertise in Little Books.  This unit has a focus on non-fiction reading and really reading to gain understanding and learn from the books we read.  This week we will sort our classroom library to get all of our informational books organized so they are easier for us to shop for.  We will learn that as we read about a topic we become experts on it and learn to share that information with others by telling the main topic of a book and giving key details learned in the book. We will also work on stopping and asking questions while we read.

Writing:Our writing unit will be greatly supported by our reading work as we will begin a new unit called All About Books.  The goal of this unit will be able to write across one topic for several pages including key ideas and details.  Students will be able to show off their knowledge of personal interest and will take such ownership over being topic experts.  This week we will create book covers to keep track of our writing ideas and will be reading many All About books to help us understand the many ways we can show all we know about a topic.

Science/Social Studies:  Students will present their plant and animal projects they worked on this week.  Stay tuned to see these on SeeSaw.  We will also take some time this week to do some close reading of story books that have a focus on friendship and problem solving.  These are important things to discuss at this time of the year as students are very comfortable with each other and need reinforcement to understand how their actions can impact others.