April 2, 2010
Dear Kindergarten Parents,
It’s been another busy week in kindergarten.
We are on our last chapter in The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Clearly. This is the first time I have used this book in kindergarten for a read-aloud and I’m pleased to see how much the children are enjoying it. Next week we’ll be having a book celebration as we did with Charlotte’s Web and also My Father’s Dragon.
In math, we are working on our unit focusing on 2-D and 3-D shapes. Next week we will begin to look at 3-D shapes including sphere, cylinder, cube, cone, and rectangular prism. I am sending home some information on this unit and also a shape hunt activity for you to do at home. If you have an opportunity to go looking for 3-D shapes (described on the handout) and could record what you find that would be great. Please return these by next Friday (April 9th) and we’ll share these at math time.
In studio art today, Mrs. Harvey is sharing the story of Frederick by Leo Lionni. This is another story of a mouse and the author uses torn paper for his illustrations. The children will be making their own torn paper illustrations to go with this story. Look for these to be displayed in the hallway next week. They are adorable!
In literacy groups we continue to work on a variety of reading skills-sight words, sentences, punctuation, consonant and vowel sounds, letter formation, word families, alphabetical order, and early readers. The children are using all of this in their writing as well.
Next week, we will be continuing all of this learning and will also have a few special activities. On Tuesday, Mrs. Brown, the school nurse will be joining us for a lesson on poison safety. On Wednesday, the children will be voting for their favorite Red Clover Book in library. On Thursday, we will be having our Four Winds lesson on white-tailed deer.
Thank you for your help with outdoor clothing the past couple of weeks, as we worked through the change from snow to mud. The playground is fairly dry at this point and we no longer need snowpants. Boots may still be a good idea to avoid muddy sneakers but I leave that to you.
I also want to thank you for your patience with our recent paper mache project and the resulting need for clothes laundering. We have been studying farm animals as part of our School-Farm Correspondence Program activities. In this project, we are making paper mache pigs and they need three layers of paper mache. The good news is that we have done two of the layers (leaving one more to go next week) and, being a mixture of flour and water, it washes out quite easily. Next week we will also begin learning about chickens on the farm. The farmers we are writing to said they should be getting their baby pigs and chicks any time now.
I hope you and your families enjoy the amazing spring weather that is on the way for the weekend.
Sincerely,
Kim
