Kindergator Update 10.20 and some sad news

Thank you so much for coming to talk with me/us at conferences. It is always exciting getting to know more details about the kiddos and working together to brainstorm ideas to help them. I really appreciate you coming in to meet. Though it is a short week, we squeezed in lots of learning.

Reading: We continued to work on retelling fiction stories while we began discussing how to retell non-fiction by figuring out the main idea and three supporting details. We used bats as our topic to explore for both fiction and non-fiction.

Math: We continued our work on classification and focused on how you can sort the same group of things in different ways of you think out of the box. The students are getting much better in the skill and we thank all the parents who are sorting and classifying with the kids at home to reinforce this skill. Halloween candy is a great thing to sort with. May I suggest the groups of “Candy you should let Mrs. Powers eat for you” and the much smaller group of “Candy you can keep.” Haha.

Writing: We added size as a way to describe in our writing and began looking at texture too. We will begin our next story soon and we cannot wait to see how much they have improved in their writing.

Vocabulary for the week: cube, cone, cylinder, sphere, problem, solution, materials, texture

Big Things:

As the children may have told you, Mrs. Watson has been out all week and may be out a bit longer. She has been taking care of her mother who was very ill and has since passed away. Please send good thoughts her way. Many kids made cards for her in class this week too.

We had such fun with our pumpkin carving and pumpkin STEM project we did this week. We have placed the jack-o-lanterns and some uncarved pumpkins in our garden bed and we are going to see how they decompose when cut open and closed. Thank you so much to everyone who sent in pumpkins and the Kerns family who provided boards we were able to use as ramps. I don’t think I have ever been so excited to get such a strange gift before, but it made a really fun project possible.

I have once again done something unknowingly wrong with my email technology this week and it turns out some or no emails sent while at school but not “docked” were getting out. I think it is all sorted out now, but if you are expecting a reply from me for something and haven’t gotten it, please contact me again just in case.

Thank you to:

The Kerns for donating boards to use for STEM in class and Mrs. Kerns for coming in to volunteer help carve pumpkins with us.

Zeb, Reese, Elle and Olivia who ate lunch with me as their STAR behavior reward. We had a wonderful conversation about what they really want to Christmas and I learned that there are now Barbie houses taller than me.

Arnold, Aspen, Jackson and Harper H., who brought in multiple meaning words this week. I had never realized how many color words have multiple meanings like green meaning new to something, blue meaning sad and yellow meaning scared.

Zeb, Jackson, Olivia, Harper H., Grant, Reese and Arnold who have begun asking questions about words they do not understand in the stories they read or I read to them. We practiced words like exhausted, flutter, ajar and wingspan because of them. WHOA!

Thank you to our amazing PTA who send in food for those of us who stay late for Tuesday conferences to quickly chow down on. It is so much more of a blessing than we can say, especially since we eat lunch at 10 am.

Thank you to PTA for choosing kindergarten as the recipient of their PTA grant. We submitted a request to purchase materials that relate to creative play, engineering and STEM and they picked us as one of the winners! We will be exploring our needs and wants to find the perfect ideas for your kiddos, but please thank our PTA board if you get the chance. And thank you to everyone who joined PTA and helped make this possible. We are sooooooooooo excited!

Since Mrs. Walkup and I are taking turns running morning check-in we want to say thank you to everyone who write specific notes about transportation changes, or after school club days or even when they send in money. It has helped us more than we can say.