April 30-May 4

This week is all about the NEW!  New units in (almost) every subject and a new month! It is crazy to think we are gearing up for our last full month together!!!

With our Building For Kids Trip quickly approaching, we do need an idea of interested chaperones by May 3rd! Please shoot me an email if you would like to join us, if you have not already sent back the permission slip!  We are hoping to take all of those interested, but the BFK needs numbers by this week so they can plan accordingly!  

Important Dates and Reminders:
5/17: Building for Kids Field Trip

5/22: Tailgate Family Night
5/25 &5/28: NO SCHOOL


Math: Here are a few highlights of what students will be doing in math this week:

• Telling, retelling, and writing equations for addition and subtraction stories
• building partners of 10 in many different ways to build fluency
• Practicing showing partners for 7-9
• Building numbers 1-20 with different tools and looking for patterns within the model

Reading: We will start a new unit on characters this week! We will start to learn the ways you can ‘meet’ the characters in our books. Some ways to do this are to pay attention to the title, cover, and setting. We will also take picture walks and think about the feelings our characters have. By the end of the week, we will be focusing on the changes in character feelings.

Writing: ATTENTION! Writers will be having a writing boot camp this week! As we head into the last part of the year, we will push ourselves to do what strong writers ALWAYS do: make writing easy to read and write more and more. We will make our writing easy to read by making sure we have a vowel sound in every word and checking to see that the first letter of the sentence is uppercase. In order to write more, writers ask questions to add more sentences to the page and set goals of how much writing they can get done in a day.

Science: We will began our science unit about forces:  the pushes, pulls, and other actions that we do whenever we do work. Scientists will learn that before we had machines, we had to do lots of work by hand. We will talk about how machines are not magical; rather they just seem that way because there are often moving parts hidden inside. Encourage your child’s curiosity by asking them to go on a “machine walk” around the house: invite your child to identify machines around your home.(examples include things like a washing machine or dryer, a dishwasher, a hair dryer, an electric toothbrush, a car).

April 23-27

Now that it is almost May (holy cow), hopefully spring weather will be here to stay!  There will be some snow on the playground, so please continue to send boots so students feet stay warm and dry...an extra pair of socks might also be helpful!

Important Dates and Reminders:
4/26: Movie Star Day
5/17: Building for Kids Field Trip
5/22: Tailgate Family Night


Math: Mathematicians will practice their nonpattern facts this week. The nonpattern equations are 3+2, 2+3, 2+2, 5-4, 5-3, 5-2, 4-3, 4-2, and 3-2.

We will practice using a variety of strategies including:

A game called subtraction smash that looks like this:


Drawings and math mountains





Using tools such as bead racks, math manipulatives or number lines





Using cut out hands to show the equations


These are great ways to practice any equations that your child may be working on!


Reading: Readers reread for many reasons! They read the first time to solve tricky words. They can read a book again to make their reading smooth. Then, they can read it a third time to post it funny, interesting, or important parts that they would like to share with their partner. Your reader will be creating a video to show you how they use rereading in their books! Check out the videos on Seesaw on Thursday!


Writing:  Our persuasive writing is coming to a close this week and these writers have become so convincing! They have been working on writing their opinions about problems they see in the world. To celebrate Earth Day and the end of our unit, students will be creating posters that show lots of writing about a problem. It could be littering, cutting down trees, wasting electricity, etc. We will share our opinion posters with Mrs. Lenzner's class on Friday!

Science: This will be the last week of our weather watching unit!  We will explore how the sun heats up different surfaces like concrete, grass, rocks and mud.  We will also do some close reading on different types of weather.

April 16-20

The KAT was such a fun way to wrap up the week!  The students ROCKED at answering questions and sharing all they know!

Important Dates and Reminders:
4/18: PAC field trip
4/19: Family Night 5:30-7:00pm
4/20: Dress in green and blue for Earth day
4/26: Movie Star Day

**On May 17, we will be taking a field trip to Building for Kids.  Since we will be taking chaperones I wanted to get this date out early!  More info will be coming soon!


Math: We are just beginning our LAST math unit of the year...holy cow!!  This unit is called Consolidation of Concepts and will focus on all of the important skills students need to attain in Kindergarten in order to have a solid grasp of mathematical concepts to build on in 1st grade.  All of these topics are repetitive and you might find me to a be a broken record when keeping you in the loop!  Please know that this is by design...our curriculum Math Expressions, is a spiral curriculum, meaning concepts are taught over and over across the year in various ways, taking students' development into consideration and giving them ample opportunity to master and deeply understand concepts!

Reading: This week we will continue to focus on cross checking what we read by asking: "what sounds right, looks right and makes sense."  We will learn that readers are flexible and try out many different strategies when trying to answer these questions.  We will also learn about the importance and reasons for rereading.  The big reasons we want students to reread is to make sure they are understanding what is read and to make sure their reading sounds smooth and fluent (not like a robot :)).  In the classroom we are now working on "scooping up" words in sentences and phrases rather than reading word by word.  Students may likely still read in a choppy way when decoding new words, but we can encourage them to go back and make it sound smooth.

Writing:  Our persuasive writing unit will turn a corner this week!   We will all rally around a common cause "Keeping the Earth Clean" and will use all we have learned as persuasive writers so far to create books, songs, letters and signs to persuade others to do their part to keep our planet clean.  This is the perfect time to do this work as Earth Day is approaching!

Science:  This week we will study the sun and the impact it can have on temperature as well as the way it provides light.  We will learn about a city in Norway that is situated in a way where it can receive no light and will hypothesize and experiment with ways we could create light.  We are in need of flashlights for this experiment!  If you can lend us some please send them to school by Tuesday!!!

April 9-13

This week our Knowledge-A-Thon happens!  This is is our biggest fundraiser of the year and is so fun and exciting for the students!  I hope you are finding time to practice questions at home...we will also be practicing them in class this week.  I also hope you will plan to join us for the KAT celebration dance on Friday night!   If you want volunteer to help with the KAT sign up here.

 Here is another copy of Kindergarten KAT questions!

We are in need of plastic grocery bags to be used at family night.  If you have some please send them to school with your child!

Dates and Reminders:
April 9-13: Knowledge-a-thon week (dress up days below
4/9- K-Kozy Day (PJ's or sweats)
4/10: NO SCHOOL
4/11: A- Dress like an Answer to a KAT question
4/12: T- Dress like a teacher
4/13: Olympic color day- Kindergarten is RED
4/13: KAT celebration dance 6-8pm
4/18: PAC field trip
4/19: Family Night 5:30-7:00pm
4/20: Dress in green and blue for Earth day
4/26: Movie Star Day

Math:  This week we will wrap up Unit 4.  We will spend some time this week reviewing 3D shapes (cone, sphere, cylinder and cube).  Mathematicians will explore if these shapes can roll and stack and explain why or why not.  Building 3D shapes will also help us to notice important attributes like numbers of corners and faces.  Lastly, we will compare 3D shapes and sort by their attributes.   One way to reinforce this at home is to have your child collect real life objects that represent these shapes.

Reading: We are continuing to work on being resourceful readers and to use all we know to tackle tricky parts in our books.  This week readers will learn to be especially flexible as they try one strategy, then another and so on, until their reading makes sense, sounds right and looks right.  One way we readers can make this become more automatic is to make plan prior to reading for the strategies they will use by rereading charts they have in their book bin or see around the classroom.

Writing:Opinion writers are on a roll writing letters to fix problems they see! Don't be surprised if you see some letters coming home about problems that can be changed. This week, writers will figure out how to make their writing even more convincing. First, they will learn to angle their letters toward a certain audience. Then, they will study a sample opinion letter to decide what strong opinion writers do and try to add it to their pieces. Here is a list of the some of the ways we can be convincing.






The students will also be reminded to reread their writing and make sure it is clear and easy to read before sending it out into the world.

Science: Scientists have learned that part of being a weather watcher is paying attention to the wind. We will study the wind this week by doing a few close readings to gather some knowledge on wind. Scientists will apply this knowledge to answer these questions:

How can we make leaves move using wind?
How can we make branches move?
What does it feel like?
How does the wind change?
The students will plan and conduct experiments to answer their questions.

April 2-6

Whew!  It will be a fun and busy month with our knowledge-a-thon and school field trip to the PAC!  Just what we need to cure any lingering spring fever!

Important Dates and Reminders:
April 9-13: Knowledge-a-thon week (dress up days below
4/9- K-Kozy Day (PJ's or sweats)
4/10: NO SCHOOL
4/11: A- Dress like an Answer to a KAT question
4/12: T- Dress like a teacher
4/13: Olympic color day- Kindergarten is RED
4/13: KAT celebration dance 6-8pm
4/18: PAC field trip
4/19: Family Night 5:30-7:00pm
4/20: Dress in green and blue for Earth day
4/26: Movie Star Day



Math: We are nearing the end of our current math unit and will use this week to review partners of larger numbers as well as practice the subtraction patterns that can help us to be fluent.  We will do some comparing and addition work while seeing numbers in more then one way by playing the card game Ratuki.

Reading:  We have recently started a new unit called Readers Are Resourceful.  This unit will focus on using meaning (picture clues), syntax (how books sound) and visual (letters in words) in more complex books.  We will rely heavily on the chart below to keep track of what we have tried and can try when we get stuck and to set goals for building up our repertoire of strategies. 

Writing:  I hope your child has shared with your some of the important topics they are writing about to persuade others.  Please know you may receive some books or letters regarding "problems" your child might want to persuade others to fix at home or in your neighborhood.  We are really working on using our words as a way to let people know about a problems see and ways we think it can be fixed.  This week we will work on keeping our writing stamina up by thinking of lots of causes to write about and will work on revision and spelling strategies.

Science: This is such a great time of the year for us to be investigating weather!  We have been spending some time with our weather journals outside observing and describing the temperature, wind, sky and precipitation.  This week we will take a look at how the season impacts the weather and explore when the seasons happen and why.