Week Two: August 21-25

Good afternoon! We all survived our first full week of kindergarten! :) It was a wonderful week in the classroom and I hope that your child is having a blast so far!  Below are some very important announcements and information.

Curriculum Night: This Wednesday, August 30th is Curriculum Night.  Please plan to attend one of the three sessions listed below.  The session will run about 30-35 minutes.  This night is very important to attend!  I will explain many important things about kindergarten at CSD including a broad overview of curriculum, field trips and performances, expectations of students, student/parent/teacher communication, parent roles, and more! If you cannot attend, I will send home the packet of information with your child.

6:00-6:40 Session 1

6:40-7:20 Session 2

7:20-8:00 Session 3

Please see the information below from the CSD Admin Team regarding curriculum night:

*Encourage parents with multiple children to “divide and conquer.”  Do not worry if you cannot get to all of your child’s sessions.  Teachers will send home all information shared at Curriculum Night after the event.

*Due to space limitations, we ask that students not attend Curriculum Night.  This is intended to be a parent-only event.  Thank you for understanding.

Tardies: The school day officially begins at 8:15 AM.  If you arrive later than 8:15, you will need to check-in at the front desk and get a tardy slip.  Your child will bring the tardy slip to us when they come to our classroom.  Thank you for abiding by this!

Morning routine: As some of you know, we have been working really hard with each child on their routine when they walk in our door each morning.  They know that they have 4 things to unpack (lunch box, snack, water bottle, and blue folder).  We really want the children to do this instead of the parents so that they become independent in these activities.  They are very capable to do this on their own when we show them our expectation for this. It would be great to say your goodbye to your child at the classroom door and allow them to walk in and begin their morning routine.  Thank you for helping us and your child with this!

Blue Communication Folders: Please empty these folders out every single night.  There may be something important that we send home that needs to be seen.  The children also have a hard time when packing up papers if the folder is already full.

Change of clothes: If you have not already, please send in a change of clothes (shirt, shorts/pants, and underwear) in case of an accident.  Please label the ziplock bag with their name.

Wish List: We have had some parents ask us about a "wish list" for our classroom.  Here are some items we could use. :) Thank you!!!
-Recess equipment (soccer balls, footballs, kickballs, jump ropes, etc.)
-Magic Erasers
-Glade Plug-Ins (vanilla, cinnamon, or lavender scents)
-Tacky Glue bottles
-Stickers (any age appropriate ones that we can put out at the art center)

Book box: You should have seen a few nursery rhyme "mini-books" come home this week in your child's blue folder.  These are great books for your child to read at home because we have already read them multiple times at school!  We have encouraged the children to make a "book box" to keep all of these books in over the course of kindergarten.  They can use a shoe box, cereal box, amazon box, etc. to make this and can decorate it to make it fun! That way they can easily go and pull these books to read to you at night.

Math: This week in math we began our math workshop! I will explain more about math workshop at curriculum night.  We spent all this week exploring our math manipulatives such as unifix cubes, C-rods, pattern blocks, and colored teddy bears.  The students learned two math games called Roll & Cover and Roll & Record.

Reader's Workshop/Thematic: This week we combined reader's workshop and thematic centers since we are learning about nursery rhymes!  So far we have learned Itsy Bitsy Spider, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Old Mother Hubbard!  We read and colored mini-books for each and also added the poem into our daybooks.

Science: We had our first "Sci-Fri" experiment today!  We did an experiment called "Sink or Float?" and we predicted and tested 10 different items to see if they sunk or floated!  We made a graphing chart to record all of our information.  We will talk about the steps of the scientific method each week when we do science!

Have a great weekend and see you all next Wednesday night!
Love,
Mrs. James

Week One: August 14-18

Good evening kindergarten parents!  Welcome to our class blog. :) Here you will read about important announcements, upcoming events, what we are studying and learning each week, and any extension activities that you can do at home.  We have had a GREAT week in our classroom so far and I am very excited for our last staggered entry group tomorrow and then for the whole class to come on Friday!

This week we have been learning all about our classroom procedures including unpacking in the morning, packing up in the afternoon, sitting on the carpet, taking care of our classroom, math workshop tubs, free choice centers, and many others!  We are learning all about our friends and working on remember their names and fun facts about them.  We also are learning all about the sun, the moon, and the solar eclipse in preparation for Monday!  We did an art/science activity where the students got to sponge paint a sun paper plate and a moon paper plate so they can actually move the plates to show what happens during an eclipse.

- Blue Communication Folders: Your child will bring home a blue folder every day that has papers in it.  Most of the papers will be their school work and occasionally we will send home a note in it or an important school wide note.  Please have your child unpack this folder each afternoon and empty all of the papers out.  Your child needs to bring it back empty the next day.

- Visitor/Parent Pass: CSD has put a new procedure in place for this school year.  Anyone entering the building that plans to walk in the school for any reason will need to sign in on a sign in sheet and grab an orange pass.  This includes pick up and drop off time.  You return the orange pass when you leave.

-Afternoon Pickup: As of now, we are staying in the classroom during dismissal at the end of the day.  It has worked the past two days because we have had small groups.  We will see how this goes on Friday with the whole group!  Mrs. Rumburg or I walk each child down to the carpool line when their number pops up on our tv screen.  This could get tricky with 21 students so we may end up going and sitting down closer to carpool to make this process easier.  I will let you all know what we decide to do. :) You are welcome to pick up at the classroom or come through carpool.  If you come to the classroom, just knock on the door and we will send your child out to you!  If you are wanting to do the carpool line this year, I suggest starting sooner rather than later so that your child can get practice with it.

-Class Schedule: Here is a link to our class schedule!  As of now it is set in stone but may be tweaked if our class needs extra time here or there.  We have specials on Monday's and Friday's so these days are very different than the rest.  Thursday's are also a little different because we go to the park!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nd0bq1zNwzSEejfL01yf5JVqZiWbzz5Wq7_8LOqLyTw/edit?usp=sharing

Below is a link to an article Mr. Hoover (another kindergarten teacher) found that includes fifteen questions to replace the typical "How was school today?" question.  Be sure to check it out so that you can hear all about what we do at school every day from your child. :)
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/parents-fifteen-questions-replace-how-was-school-today-elena-aguilar

Have a great night!
Love,
Mrs. James