April 30-May 4

Hello K families! Can you believe that there is only one more month of Kindergarten? Time flies when you're having fun and learning lots!

If you are interested in being a chaperone on our May 17th field trip to the Building for Kids, please let me know by May 3rd! Feel free to send me an email or send in the permission slip back:)

Upcoming Events: 
April 26: Movie star day
May 17: Field trip to The Building for Kids
(We will taking chaperones so I wanted to give you a head's up on the date! More info coming soon!)
May 22: Family Night

Library Book Return Dates:
May 7
May 15

Teacher Appreciation Food Sign Up 


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.

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

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

Have a wonderful week and enjoy the nice weather!

Upcoming Events: 
April 26: Movie star day
May 17: Field trip to The Building for Kids
(We will taking chaperones so I wanted to give you a head's up on the date! More info coming soon!)
May 22: Family Night

Library Book Return Dates:
April 27
May 7
May 15

What's up in Room 82 this week? 

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. Hixon'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

Welp, guess it's time to send snow gear back to school! Enjoy your snow day!

Upcoming Events: 
April 18: PAC Field Trip
April 19: Family Night
April 20: Wear green and blue for Earth Day
April 26: Movie star day
May 17: Field trip to The Building for Kids
(We will taking chaperones so I wanted to give you a head's up on the date! More info coming soon!)

Library Book Return Dates:
April 19
April 27

What's up in Room 82 this week? 

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

It's the KAT Rush Week! Dress up days are listed under the upcoming events. Students will answer KAT questions on Friday morning and celebrate at the dance from 6-8 on Friday night. We can't wait! Here is a link to the KAT questions.

Here is the link for the April school newsletter.


Library Book Return Dates:
April 11
April 19
April 27

Here is the link to the sign up for KAT volunteers!

2018 Knowledge-A-Thon (KAT) Day
Here is the link to sign up for KAT Dance volunteers!
http://signup.com/go/SVDqrWT

Upcoming Events: 
April 9: Wear PJs or comfy clothes
April 10: No School
April 11: Dress like an answer to a kat question
April 12: Dress like a teacher
April 13: Class color day--Dress in red
April 13: Knowledge-A-Thon
April 19: Family Night
April 20: Wear green and blue for Earth Day
April 26: Movie star day

What is happening in Room 82 this week? 

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. 

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 observe or collect real life objects that represent these shapes.

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.