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Friday, September 2, 2016

Weekly News: September 5-9


I hope you enjoyed the three day weekend with your families! We are looking forward to a short, but busy week in kindergarten! There is a lot of information and I appreciate you taking the time to read. 

School picture day will be THIS Friday, September 9th! Be on the look-out for a flyer being sent home soon!

Electives will begin next Monday, September 12th. 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.

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!

I have submitted our book orders and they should be here soon! 

Save the Date! We will be having two Kindergarten Parent Workshops on Monday, September 12th and Monday, September 19th. I would like to invite all parents into the classroom on these dates from 2:00-3:00 to learn ways to better support your child at home in the areas of foundational reading skills and math. We will go over our kindergarten goals and common core standards for the year and learn strategies to help your child at home. Childcare will be provided down at the playground for ILCS students. I hope you are able to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity! 

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 4th. 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 me directly at jcbess@inlandleaders.com. The $7 chaperone fee needs to be paid in cash directly to your child's teacher, not through Dollar a Day. On Friday, September 23rd, we will need to give our final head count to Los Rios Ranch, so if you would like to chaperone, please email me by this date. 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! 

Here is the link to donate on Dollar A Day: 

We will be using Dollar A Day monies for ALL field trips. Thank you so much for your support! 


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. Some of these little books came home on 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! More paper books will be coming home throughout the year - if they have a big star or stamp on them, that means your child has read it for me fluently and they can now keep them at home! We will also begin Book Bags this week. Please see the Homework tab for more information. 

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: At ILCS this year, we are ROARING. The acronym ROAR stands for Respect self, others, and property, Own your actions, Act safely, and Rise to servant leadership. For the next several weeks, we will be discussing the O in class -  OWN YOUR ACTIONS. We will talk about what that means and how we can own our actions at school. Our goal is to have students take ownership of their own behavior as we all strive to be leaders in our classroom and school. On Friday, your child brought home their very first "check in" sheet. Students have been “checking in” with themselves and their teacher throughout the day on their behavior at school: if they are GREEN (I am doing a great job Roaring today!), YELLOW (I am doing well, but I think I can do even better!), RED (I will choose to change my behavior). Most students have been choosing their color all by themselves and I have been so proud of their honesty and their willingness to change their behaviors throughout the day. I have also been giving away a LOT of Roar tickets. Roar tickets are received when a student is caught "Roaring" (respecting and owning their actions). Every Friday, Roar tickets are chosen to go to the treasure box.

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