Weekly News: September 7-11

I hope you enjoyed the three day weekend with your families! We are looking forward to a short, but busy week in kindergarten! 

School picture day will be THIS Friday, September 11th! Be on the look-out for a flyer being sent home soon!

Your child's beginning of the year assessment results were sent home last week. Please take some time to review these results with your child. My goal for all students is to have 100% letter, sound, phonemic awareness, shape, and number recognition by the end of our first trimester in November. 

Electives will begin next Monday, September 14th. The list of elective classes will be posted this week. If your child is participating in an elective, you may send a lunch to school with him/her on that elective day and lunch supervision will be provided for your children. Kindergarten electives are from 12:50-1:20 and the elective teachers will dismiss your children at 1:20 on the ramp. Please be aware that some electives may last until 1:30, depending on the elective.

At this point of the year, we appreciate you saying your goodbyes on the playground. We know this is hard, but it makes the transition from playground to classroom much easier. Thank you in advance for your support.

A special thank you to our Friday moms for helping last week! We enjoyed our first day of Fun Friday centers with you. This week, we will be tasting apples and writing about which color apple we like the best. Thank you for checking Parentsquare and signing up to bring apples!

Our books orders are due this week! If you would like to order books, please place your orders soon. I will be submitting the order on Friday!

If you have not donated classroom headphones for your child yet, we are still in need of headphones! One pair for each student is ideal so that we can make great use of our iPads and listening centers.

We are so excited to announce that our first field trip is planned! We will be going to Los Rios Ranch in Oak Glenn on Tuesday, October 13th. We will be leaving school by bus at approximately 8:30 in the morning and returning around dismissal at 12:30. The students will get to meet Johnny Appleseed, tour the apple orchards, and even make our very own apple cider! In order for our kindergarten classes to go on this field trip (and all future field trips this year), we are asking for donations to be made to our Dollar A Day program through the school. For this field trip, we are asking for a generous donation of $20 per student. This will help cover the cost of the apple farm, the bus, and the very special kindergarten field trip t-shirt that your child will wear on all field trips this year. Unfortunately, if our kindergarten team does not receive donations, we will not be able to go on this wonderful field trip :(  We are also looking for volunteers to join us and chaperone our field trip. The cost for chaperones is also $7.  If you are interested in chaperoning for our field trip on this day, please email your teacher directly. The $7 chaperone fee needs to be paid in cash directly to your child's teacher, not through Dollar a Day. On Friday, September 25th, we will need to give our final head count to Los Rios Ranch, so if you would like to chaperone, please let your teacher know by then. We apologize for any inconvenience, but siblings and little ones are not allowed on this field trip due to the safety of our kindergarten students you will be chaperoning.  Also, be on the look-out for the field trip permission slip that will be coming home in your child's Take Home Folder as we get closer to our field trip. We are so excited for this excellent field trip with your children! 

Please do not forget to donate towards the field trip under Dollar A Day! Here is the link: http://www.inlandleaders.com/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=206371&type=d   We will be using Dollar A Day monies for ALL field trips. Thank you so much for your support! 

We are very excited to have such an amazing room mom this year - Mrs. Sams!

Mrs. Sams is Ben's mommy and her contact information is: 

Email: kellymsams@gmail.com

Cell Phone: 909-226-7001

In the future, you can find Mrs. Sam's information in our "Room Parent" tab. 

What Are We Learning This Week?:

Sight Words: LOOK, HERE THIS. 

Letter Team: CH (like in "cheetos") and OO (we are learning that OO can make two sounds: OO like in "look" and OO like in "pool".)

Word Family: AM - like in yam, ram, Sam, Pam, etc. 

Reading: This week, we will begin reading books about apples and Johnny Appleseed. We will also read lots of funny books by Mo Willems. Students will continue to read little books in class that include sight words and letter teams. These little books will begin to come home starting Friday. Please keep them inside your special home book box that you shared on the first week of school and practice reading them every day! 

Writing: We are writing a big book together about science tools using sight words we have learned so far. We will be studying these science tools and how and when we use them. We will continue learning to put spaces between each word, use an uppercase at the beginning of each sentence with lowercase letters throughout, and use a period at the end. We will continue to use our sight words in our sentences and use our sound chart to help us sound out the words we do not know how to write.

Math: This week we will learn the name and value of each coin and pretty soon, we will start counting money! You can help at home by having your child name and tell you the value of coins around the house.  We will also learn to count by ordinal numbers (first, second, third...). We will also learn that we can represent numbers in different ways: on a tens frame, with a numeral, on our fingers, with dots on dice, etc. 

Leadership: This month and throughout September, our theme is "GRIT". We are teaching that grit is perseverance and passion for long-term goals.