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