Chrysanthemum

Respect is the core value of October. We listened to the story of Chrysanthemum and talked about how the characters were respectful to one another at the end of the story. Ask your child how they can practice being respectful in Kindergarten.

Community Helpers Shared Readings

Ask your child to find the sight words :)

Ask your child to name a Stapleton Community Helper

Hello Families,

It has been an exciting few weeks here in Kindergarten. September has been full of short weeks, but we have been working extremely hard to remember the rules and routines of our classroom.

In September we have been focusing on:

Literacy: The sight words we have learned are the, to, you, I, and a. Echo helped us with our letters t, b, f, n, and m and we practiced our letter formation in literacy centers.  We played with rhyming houses and sang Way Up High In The Apple Tree to practice our rhyming. Our shared reading for the past two weeks is called Stapleton Community Helpers. This week our shared reading will be Community Helpers.  We received our book boxes last week where we keep our own copies of the shared readings, Fundations Letters, and a name list of all the people in our classroom. We use our book boxes to practice independent reading.

Math: We always practice math during our morning meeting time. We use the number of days we have been in school to practice building numbers in a variety of ways (using numerals, our fingers, the Rekenrek, straws, and a ten frame).  We have added some colors to our math word wall since we will be doing many color-by-number activities in math this year. We have been working on our sorting skills, number formation, and one-to-one correspondence when counting objects and writing the number.

Science: We continue to talk about the weather and seasons in morning meeting. We have welcomed Fall and all of the wonderful smells, sights, tastes, sounds, and feels (5 senses) that come along with it. In the upcoming weeks we will be talking about all the changes that occur in Fall.  Our weather graph shows that we have had mostly sunny days in school.

Social Studies: We have started to discuss community helpers. Last week we went on a tour to meet our Stapleton Community Helpers, and wrote them letters asking questions about how they help at school (nurse, Principal, office managers, custodians, teachers, and lunch helpers). This week we will begin to learn about community helpers outside of Stapleton School.

Other: We had our first class trip to the Stapleton library to visit Mrs. Garry. We are learning how to take care of our library books in the classroom. We will be taking library books home in the upcoming weeks. We learned about the Zones of Regulation and talked about how our feelings fit into those zones. Kindergarten Curriculum Night was a great success! Thanks to all who were able to make it :)

September has been a busy month in Kindergarten. We hope to have just as much fun in October!

Sincerely,

Miss O'Brien, Mrs. Lawson, Ms. Murray & Miss Blake

Our Weather Clip Chart :)

Now that we have had 10 days of school, students are able to articulate "expected" and "unexpected" behaviors. In room 109, it is very important that we acknowledge students for making positive, expected choices. Each student begins a day with his/her clip on the picture of a sunshine described as "Ready to Learn." Sometimes when a student makes a positive behavior choice, a teacher will recognize the student in a special way by asking the student to "clip up." :) Students are able to move up to "Super Star Learner." If a student makes an unexpected choice, a teacher may move the student's clip down to a partly cloudy picture labeled "Make Better Choices." Moving a clip down is a reminder to the student to show expected behaviors. As soon as an expected behavior is shown, he/she will be asked to move the clip back up one picture to "Ready to Learn." Students make many choices each and every day and it is important to understand that moving a clip up or down is a "NBD" (No Big Deal). We may move our clip up and down multiple times in a day depending on how a student is feeling, the choices we make, and what is going on in our classroom. Here is a photo of our Clip Chart:

Ask your child if he/she moved his/her clip today :) 

Welcome to Kindergarten!

We have had an amazing first week of school! Students have been learning routines, meeting new friends, singing songs, reading stories, counting school days and much more! Here is an example of our daily schedule, we are very busy every day!