What a busy week we have had in kindergarten! This week we focused on the artist Claude Monet. We learned that he was from Paris, France and the style of art he created is called Impressionism. He liked to paint outdoors and often painted boats, ponds, lakes and of course beautiful waterlilies. One of his good friends that he liked to paint with was the artist, Renoir. We looked at lots of artwork by Monet, read several stories about him, and of course created lots of art! We can't wait to show you our masterpieces at the upcoming art gallery! This week we will study the artist, Michelangelo.
One other artist that we learned about this week was actually an artist from Mooresville, NC. Her name is Selma Burke. She is an African-American artist who spent much of her childhood making sculptures out of the clay on the riverbeds near her home. She is most well known for her portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which is found on a dime. Anytime you have a dime in your pocket, purse or wallet know that you are carrying around a piece of Selma Burke's art work. Very cool indeed! We looked at dimes this week and talked about how much they were worth, about which President is on the dime, and of course that local artist, Selma Burke is responsible for creating the portrait of him on the dime!
In math this week we continued our geometry unit and focused on both two and 3D shapes. We are working on describing shapes by their attributes. We talked about lines and points on shapes, as well as sides and faces. We will do some more exploring with 3D shapes this week. Have your child start to look for 3D shapes all around them. We learned a new poem about 3D shapes that describes a cone, rectangular prism, cylinder, and sphere. We discussed real objects that might look like these things in our everyday lives.
We focused on the high frequency word "do" in our literacy time this week. We created a book that has this word in it several times. We highlighted the word and practiced reading the book. Please have your child practice reading this book at home. We also talked about the difference between a lower case d and a lower case b. These are letters that most kindergarten students tend to reverse when they write. We practiced writing them in shaving cream, as well as a movement activity that crossed our mid-lines to practice which way these letters go. We put up some visual reminders in our classroom of b having a belly and d wearing a diaper to help the students remember which direction these letters should go when they are written or when they see them in print. We are working hard to make sure we use mostly lower case letters when we write, especially in our names (with the exception of the first letter). If you notice your child writing his/her name in all capital letters ask him/her to see if he/she can rewrite the letters using lower case letters, except for the first letter. We are also continuing to build our reading stamina during readers workshop time.
In science we read a book about the Statue of Liberty called, Her Right Foot. We made some great connections in this book to our artist, Monet. The students were excited to find out that the Statue of Liberty was created and first put together in Paris, France. This is the same place Monet was from! We discovered that the Statue of Liberty has a thin layer of copper on her outer "skin." When she was first built she was brown, like a copper penny. However, over time and because she is outside in many types of weather the copper oxidized and turned green. This is why the Statue of Liberty we know today is the color green, even though she is made of copper. We decided to test this out with some pennies of our own. First we made predictions about what we thought would happen and drew a picture of our pennies. Next, we put our pennies in a bowl of vinegar and salt. We are letting them sit in the vinegar and salt while we are out for a few days and will be excited to see the results when we come back to school on Tuesday. We will make our observations and let you know how our experiment turns out!
Important Reminders:
-Don't forget that each child needs to bring in a gallon size bag (labeled with their name) with a collection of one hundred items by Thursday...it's the 100th day of school! Hooray! Also, students may dress like they are one hundred years old.
-Make sure you are working on your Valentine's! February 1st is this week...can you believe it?
-I will be sending out a Sign-up Genius for conferences soon. Because we lost one of our conference days due to snow, depending on how many people would like to conference we will most likely need to offer some alternate conference times. Please know that if you would like a conference and the times fill up or don't work for you, we will make sure to figure out a time that will work, so no worries!
-Please send in your mom and baby pictures as soon as possible.
Upcoming Events:
January 29 - No School, Teacher Workday
January 30 - Lottery Open House, 9:15
February 1 - 100th day of school
February 2 - Sprit Friday
February 6 - Book Fair begins (located in the MS Media Center)
Parent Advisory 9:00 am at the HS
February 14 - Valentine's Day...don't forget your special Valentine's
February 15 - Kindergarten Art Gallery....MARK YOUR CALENDARS (all parents are invited to attend)
February 16 - No School...Optional Parent Conferences
February 19 - No School....President's Day Holiday
February 20 - Field Trip to the Laurels Nursing Home
February 28 - Family Math Night - 6:30 pm
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Happy Birthday Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
What a busy and fun filled week we have had in kindergarten. We started our week by discussing our upcoming holiday and why we would be out of school. We talked about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and what an important man he was in our nation's history. We read lots of books about him, sang songs about him and did an activity with our second grade book buddies about him. We learned that Dr. King went to college to become a minister, just like his father. We also talked about the fact that his last name is King, but it doesn't mean that he is a king like in a royal family. We also talked about how you can be a doctor in a profession but it does not always mean a medical doctor. The students found this fact very interesting. We learned that Dr. King had a dream that all people, no matter what color skin they had, would be treated equally. The students were surprised to hear that most likely when their grandparents were children, that this was a time when African-Americans were not allowed to eat in the same restaurants, sit in the front of buses and use the same water fountains as white people. We talked about how Dr. King worked hard to peacefully get these laws changed so that this was not the case today. We talked about how it is our job to treat people with love, kindness and respect no matter what color skin they have so that we can keep Dr. King's dream alive.
We kicked off our artist unit this week by looking at the art work of Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky is credited with creating one of the first pieces of abstract art. He used lots of shapes in many of his pieces of abstract art. We looked at some of these and used them to create our own abstract Kandinsky. The students used circles, triangles, rectangles, squares, rhombuses, hexagons, trapezoids and arch shapes to create their Kandinsky's. Next we practiced using rulers to draw straight lines through them just as Kandinsky did in his painting. We continued talking about our geometry unit in math, and this was a beautiful tie in with this artist. Our artist for the coming week is Monet. Don't forget that we need your mommy and baby pictures by the end of this week, as we will be studying Mary Cassatt very soon. We also will need each child to bring in a BAR of Dial soap. We will use these for carving when we study Michelangelo. We have found that Dial bar soap works best for this project. Mark your calendars...we will have a kindergarten Gallery Crawl to display all of our art work that we are making during our artist unit. You won't see a lot of your child's art work coming home in the upcoming weeks, as we will be saving it for our big art show. We will have it displayed in the classroom for you to come and take a "tour" of our class museum of art on February 6. The time will be announced asap. After the art gallery you will take home all of your child's beautiful masterpieces.
This week in writer's workshop we worked on writing stories with a beginning, middle and end. We read the story A Snowy Day, and students told what happened in the beginning, middle and end of this story. Next, I modeled how to write a story with a beginning, middle and end. We talked about how some stories just use pictures, some have words and others have sentences. I showed the students how to do this in a book I wrote. After this, the students thought of a story they wanted to write about and told it to a partner. Finally, they moved to write their own stories. These turned out great! They all have such great stories to tell in their writing. We are all authors! We will continue to write more and more books.
We did an exciting science experiment this week. We talked about how arctic animals stay warm. They have a protective layer of fat called blubber that helps insulate them and keep them warm in the frigid arctic temperatures. We had the students place their hands in a bucket of ice to see how cold it was. Next, we had them place their hands in a bucket of ice, only this time they placed their hands on a bag of Crisco (to represent the blubber). The students were amazed that they could not feel the cold ice when they placed their hands on the "blubber." We watched a cool Brain Pop Jr. video clip on arctic animals and learned that these animals live in the northern hemisphere. We found this on the class map. Some examples of arctic animals are polar bears, reindeer, walruses, seals and the arctic fox. We learned that our class penguin, Penelope, is not an arctic animal because she lives at the opposite end of the earth. Penguins live in the southern hemisphere near Antarctica. We also found this on the class map as well. It was interesting to find out that even though we often think about penguins and polar bears together they really are not in the same regions of the earth.
Have you and your child been working on Valentine's? We have practiced writing a few couplets in class, and will continue to practice writing them so that the students understand the process. Remember if you write one a day you will have these finished before the big day! Let us know if you need help.
Upcoming Events:
January 15 - No School MLK Day
January 26 - No School, Teacher Workday
January 29 - No School, Teacher Workday
January 30 - 100th day of school, Lottery Open House, 9:15
February 2 - Sprit Friday
February 6 - Kindergarten Art Gallery....MARK YOUR CALENDARS
Book Fair begins (located in the MS Media Center)
Parent Advisory 9:00 am at the HS
February 14 - Valentine's Day...don't forget your special Valentine's
February 15 - No School...Teacher Workday
February 16 - No School...Teacher Workday
February 19 - No School....President's Day Holiday
February 20 - Field Trip to the Laurels Nursing Home
February 28 - Family Math Night - 6:30 pm
We kicked off our artist unit this week by looking at the art work of Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky is credited with creating one of the first pieces of abstract art. He used lots of shapes in many of his pieces of abstract art. We looked at some of these and used them to create our own abstract Kandinsky. The students used circles, triangles, rectangles, squares, rhombuses, hexagons, trapezoids and arch shapes to create their Kandinsky's. Next we practiced using rulers to draw straight lines through them just as Kandinsky did in his painting. We continued talking about our geometry unit in math, and this was a beautiful tie in with this artist. Our artist for the coming week is Monet. Don't forget that we need your mommy and baby pictures by the end of this week, as we will be studying Mary Cassatt very soon. We also will need each child to bring in a BAR of Dial soap. We will use these for carving when we study Michelangelo. We have found that Dial bar soap works best for this project. Mark your calendars...we will have a kindergarten Gallery Crawl to display all of our art work that we are making during our artist unit. You won't see a lot of your child's art work coming home in the upcoming weeks, as we will be saving it for our big art show. We will have it displayed in the classroom for you to come and take a "tour" of our class museum of art on February 6. The time will be announced asap. After the art gallery you will take home all of your child's beautiful masterpieces.
This week in writer's workshop we worked on writing stories with a beginning, middle and end. We read the story A Snowy Day, and students told what happened in the beginning, middle and end of this story. Next, I modeled how to write a story with a beginning, middle and end. We talked about how some stories just use pictures, some have words and others have sentences. I showed the students how to do this in a book I wrote. After this, the students thought of a story they wanted to write about and told it to a partner. Finally, they moved to write their own stories. These turned out great! They all have such great stories to tell in their writing. We are all authors! We will continue to write more and more books.
We did an exciting science experiment this week. We talked about how arctic animals stay warm. They have a protective layer of fat called blubber that helps insulate them and keep them warm in the frigid arctic temperatures. We had the students place their hands in a bucket of ice to see how cold it was. Next, we had them place their hands in a bucket of ice, only this time they placed their hands on a bag of Crisco (to represent the blubber). The students were amazed that they could not feel the cold ice when they placed their hands on the "blubber." We watched a cool Brain Pop Jr. video clip on arctic animals and learned that these animals live in the northern hemisphere. We found this on the class map. Some examples of arctic animals are polar bears, reindeer, walruses, seals and the arctic fox. We learned that our class penguin, Penelope, is not an arctic animal because she lives at the opposite end of the earth. Penguins live in the southern hemisphere near Antarctica. We also found this on the class map as well. It was interesting to find out that even though we often think about penguins and polar bears together they really are not in the same regions of the earth.
Have you and your child been working on Valentine's? We have practiced writing a few couplets in class, and will continue to practice writing them so that the students understand the process. Remember if you write one a day you will have these finished before the big day! Let us know if you need help.
Upcoming Events:
January 15 - No School MLK Day
January 26 - No School, Teacher Workday
January 29 - No School, Teacher Workday
January 30 - 100th day of school, Lottery Open House, 9:15
February 2 - Sprit Friday
February 6 - Kindergarten Art Gallery....MARK YOUR CALENDARS
Book Fair begins (located in the MS Media Center)
Parent Advisory 9:00 am at the HS
February 14 - Valentine's Day...don't forget your special Valentine's
February 15 - No School...Teacher Workday
February 16 - No School...Teacher Workday
February 19 - No School....President's Day Holiday
February 20 - Field Trip to the Laurels Nursing Home
February 28 - Family Math Night - 6:30 pm
Sunday, January 7, 2018
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful winter break with family and friends. Even though it was a short week this week, we have had so much fun getting back into the swing of things. We have been busy, busy, busy in kindergarten. We kicked off the new year by talking about our new calendar. We looked at the numbers in the new year and we discussed how many days are in the month of January. We talked about special holidays that happen in the month of January, and then each student completed their own January calendar. We glued these into our math daybooks. It is wonderful to see the progress the students are making in the their writing of numbers. We read lots of stories and poems about the new year. One of our favorites is Chicken Soup With Rice. We will be adding the January poem from this collection to our book boxes as a familiar reread this month. In our centers this week we made our own books about snowmen. The students are doing a wonderful job of doing their best work. They are also doing a great job of pointing to the words as they read and many are able to identify new words or letters that they recognize. We painted some beautiful snow scenes with puffy snow paint. Check these out in the hall if you are in the building. They look like a winter wonderland for sure! We worked on sequencing a recipe and then made our very own marshmallow snowflakes to eat. Finally, we began working on our time capsules. These are a keepsake for sure! Remember, if you have any extra empty paper towel rolls to send them in, as we will be turning these into the capsules for our treasured writing.
In math this week we focused on geometry. We read several stories about shapes. We played "I Spy," where students had to spy a shape in the class and we had to figure out what the shape could be. We talked about several new shapes, such as the hexagon. We found that if you put two trapezoids together you can make a hexagon. A hexagon is a six sided shape. It can be a little confusing because it looks very similar to an octagon, which has eight sides. Students seemed to be more familiar with the octagon because they see it in the shape of a stop sign. We compared the two and how they were similar and different. We also looked at squares, rectangles, circles ovals and diamonds and compared and contrasted these as well. Finally, we looked at triangles and noticed that triangles have three sides and three points. However, students were excited to see that these three sides did not always have to be equal lengths. We used play doh to make geometric shapes independently. The students did a great job with this activity!
In reading this week we had our first real "reader's workshop" time. We learned the I PICK strategy. The "I" stands for I look at books, "P"- stands for Purpose,...Why do I want to read this book?, "I" stands for Interest (we drew a heart beside of this to help us remember that it is something that we love and are really interested in), "C" stands for Comprehension - we talked about this word and drew a person thinking beside of the word to help us remember that it means we think about the book as we read, "K" stands for Know- what do I know about this book or these types of books, or what do I want to know more about this topic? The students went "book shopping" and added three new titles to their book tubs. We also talked about how we are all readers whether we read the words or the pictures, we all can read! We then found reading spots in the classroom and worked on reading our books using our I PICK strategy. Ms. Diane, Mrs. Hazlett and I moved around the room and conferenced with the children. They did an AMAZING job! I loved hearing each student talk about what they were reading and why they choose the books they shopped for to go in their book tubs. We are a room of readers for sure!
This week I sent an email to you about our kindergarten Valentine project. Please make sure you start working on that soon, trying to do at least one a day. This way the project won't seem overwhelming or become frustrating. We will be practicing lots of rhyming and couplets in class so that students begin to get the hang of how to write these (or at least verbally help dictate them to you. :) I made a HUGE mistake in the spelling of Liliah's name on the class list I sent out. Please, please, please make sure you correct the spelling of her name so that it is spelled correctly on her Valentine's. Her name is spelled LILIAH. I am so sorry for this error!
Our upcoming unit of study will be The Artist in Me...an all time favorite of mine! :) In a few weeks, we will study Mary Cassatt (one of our famous artists). We will need a baby picture of your child and mom. Cassatt did many different paintings of moms and their babies and your child will get to paint a picture of you with your child. Please send in the picture by January 16th if possible. Your original picture will be returned exactly the way it is sent to us.
We also are in need of some common household items for our artist unit next week...we are studying Kandinksy and he did a lot of work with circles. We need anything that is circle shaped to make a collage. Things that do not need to be returned to you. Some ideas are: lids (plastic water bottle lids, jar lids, container lids, etc.) Please send these in as soon as possible.
Finally, on Monday (tomorrow) we are going to be doing some fun things with mittens and gloves. Please make sure your child brings either a pair of mittens or gloves to school. Thank you in advance for your help!
Upcoming Events:
January 9 - Parent Advisory, 7:30
January 11 - Lottery Open House, 9:15 and 6:30
January 12 - CSD vs PLP home basketball game
January 15 - No School MLK Day
January 26 - No School, Teacher Workday
January 29 - No School, Teacher Workday
January 30 - 100th day of school, Lottery Open House, 9:15
In math this week we focused on geometry. We read several stories about shapes. We played "I Spy," where students had to spy a shape in the class and we had to figure out what the shape could be. We talked about several new shapes, such as the hexagon. We found that if you put two trapezoids together you can make a hexagon. A hexagon is a six sided shape. It can be a little confusing because it looks very similar to an octagon, which has eight sides. Students seemed to be more familiar with the octagon because they see it in the shape of a stop sign. We compared the two and how they were similar and different. We also looked at squares, rectangles, circles ovals and diamonds and compared and contrasted these as well. Finally, we looked at triangles and noticed that triangles have three sides and three points. However, students were excited to see that these three sides did not always have to be equal lengths. We used play doh to make geometric shapes independently. The students did a great job with this activity!
In reading this week we had our first real "reader's workshop" time. We learned the I PICK strategy. The "I" stands for I look at books, "P"- stands for Purpose,...Why do I want to read this book?, "I" stands for Interest (we drew a heart beside of this to help us remember that it is something that we love and are really interested in), "C" stands for Comprehension - we talked about this word and drew a person thinking beside of the word to help us remember that it means we think about the book as we read, "K" stands for Know- what do I know about this book or these types of books, or what do I want to know more about this topic? The students went "book shopping" and added three new titles to their book tubs. We also talked about how we are all readers whether we read the words or the pictures, we all can read! We then found reading spots in the classroom and worked on reading our books using our I PICK strategy. Ms. Diane, Mrs. Hazlett and I moved around the room and conferenced with the children. They did an AMAZING job! I loved hearing each student talk about what they were reading and why they choose the books they shopped for to go in their book tubs. We are a room of readers for sure!
This week I sent an email to you about our kindergarten Valentine project. Please make sure you start working on that soon, trying to do at least one a day. This way the project won't seem overwhelming or become frustrating. We will be practicing lots of rhyming and couplets in class so that students begin to get the hang of how to write these (or at least verbally help dictate them to you. :) I made a HUGE mistake in the spelling of Liliah's name on the class list I sent out. Please, please, please make sure you correct the spelling of her name so that it is spelled correctly on her Valentine's. Her name is spelled LILIAH. I am so sorry for this error!
Our upcoming unit of study will be The Artist in Me...an all time favorite of mine! :) In a few weeks, we will study Mary Cassatt (one of our famous artists). We will need a baby picture of your child and mom. Cassatt did many different paintings of moms and their babies and your child will get to paint a picture of you with your child. Please send in the picture by January 16th if possible. Your original picture will be returned exactly the way it is sent to us.
We also are in need of some common household items for our artist unit next week...we are studying Kandinksy and he did a lot of work with circles. We need anything that is circle shaped to make a collage. Things that do not need to be returned to you. Some ideas are: lids (plastic water bottle lids, jar lids, container lids, etc.) Please send these in as soon as possible.
Finally, on Monday (tomorrow) we are going to be doing some fun things with mittens and gloves. Please make sure your child brings either a pair of mittens or gloves to school. Thank you in advance for your help!
Upcoming Events:
January 9 - Parent Advisory, 7:30
January 11 - Lottery Open House, 9:15 and 6:30
January 12 - CSD vs PLP home basketball game
January 15 - No School MLK Day
January 26 - No School, Teacher Workday
January 29 - No School, Teacher Workday
January 30 - 100th day of school, Lottery Open House, 9:15
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