February 19th - 23rd

Happy Friday! 😊 We had a wonderful and busy week in the classroom!  We started many new things this week such as guided reading groups and sight word rings that I will talk about more in depth below.  The students are doing wonderful with all of our new activities in the classroom.  Please look at the upcoming dates below and be sure to mark them on your calendar.

Important Dates:

Wednesday, February 28th 6:30-7:30 PM Parent/Student Math Night: We would love to have every family in attendance at this event!  This is an event that you bring your child with you to.  We will have our math workshop stations set up and your child teaches you how to play each game! This is a great way for you to see how we run math workshop and what we are learning currently.  Can't wait to see you there! This is a drop-in event.  Come and leave whenever you need to! 😁
March 15th and 16th: Makeup snow days

Love and Logic Parenting Classes: These classes are led by Marianne Coale, one of the principals at CSD, and are AMAZING! I recommend this beneficial course to all parents.  Below is a tidbit of information about the class.  There are morning sessions and night sessions to accommodate all parents.  Below are also the link to the Sign Up Geniuses for them. They begin next week so sign up now!
Morning: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0f49a4ac2a1-parenting6
Evening: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0f49a4ac2a1-parenting5

The Love and Logic approach is fun!  This parenting curriculum will provide you with skills so you can feel more relaxed, hopeful and positive about raising your children. We will discover that parenting really can be enjoyable while also teaching personal responsibility and respect.

Parents will learn how to:

• Avoid un-winnable power-struggles and arguments

• Stay calm when their kids do incredibly upsetting things

• Set enforceable limits

• Avoid enabling and begin empowering

• Help their kids learn from mistakes rather than repeating them

• Raise kids who are family members rather than dictators

• And much more!

There are a total of 6 sessions.  Please only sign-up if you can attend all 6 session dates. There is a $10 workbook that we will use during these sessions.  We will have them available at our first class.

Math:

The students are doing an AMAZING job with range cards!  Those of you who conferenced with me got to either see an example of these or hear an explanation of what they are and what skills they work on.  When you come to parent math night, you will get to see these in action and watch your child complete them!  Range cards are an awesome math activity that work on many different skills and concepts.  The main purpose of range cards is for the student to learn their math facts.  Other concepts that they work on are subitizing, addition, subtraction, number writing, and equation writing.  We will continue to do these during math workshop and will occasionally do our normal math tubs.  We are using beans right now for range cards but I will introduce how to use cubes for these next week!

Literacy:

In literacy this week we started two new activities that include guided reading groups and sight word rings.  All of the students did wonderful in their first week of guided reading groups!  Students are grouped in a reading group based on their reading level.  We take a picture walk of the book, talk about any sight words they see, decode unknown words, practice reading strategies they could use, read the book, and I ask comprehension questions at the end.  These books will come home on Tuesday and need to be returned every Friday morning.  Please read this book with your child every night that it is home to practice all of these skills and to develop fluency and confidence.  Students also received their sight word rings this week and a list of fun activities that they can do to practice the sight words.  This is not mandatory at all (because we believe in the value of playing outside and spending time with family after school) but this would really benefit your child and their ability to read.  The point is to make it fun so they enjoy practicing and learning their sight words!

Thematic:

Since we finished our Artist in Me unit last week, we began our Author in Me unit this week!  We had the students help us prep different things to get ready for our Eric Care stations next week.  The four authors we will study are Eric Carle, Dr. Seuss, Leo Lionni, and Mom Fox.  We will study the author, read the books the wrote, compare the different styles of books, and talk about the similarities/differences of all of the books.  We will begin with Eric Carle!

Have a wonderful weekend!  See you all next Wednesday for parent math night! 😊
Love,
Mrs. James

Week Twenty Three: January 29th-February 2nd

Happy Friday! It is hard to believe we have already had 100 days of kindergarten!  We had such a fun day yesterday dressing up and celebrating the 100th day of school.  Most of our day revolved around activities that involved counting by 1's, 5's, and 10's to 100!  We are having a blast with our Artist in Me unit and cannot wait to share all of our artwork with you in two weeks. Read below to find out what we are learning now in kindergarten!  We have started many new things in the past two weeks. 🙂

IMPORTANT DATES:

February 7th 10:30-11:00 AM: Scholastic Book Fair! Come with our class to the book fair and help us look at and buy books! Please send in money with your child (in a ziplock bag labeled with their name) if you would like them to buy some books.  We will help them if you cannot come!
February 13th 10:30-11:30 AM: Field Trip to the Laurel's Nursing Home.  You can ride the bus with us at CSD at 10:00 AM or meet us there at 10:30 AM. The Laurel's Nursing Home is in the neighborhood Highland Creek in Charlotte. 
February 14th 1:00 PM: Valentine's Reading Party.  Parent's welcome!
February 15th 10:00 AM: Artist in Me Gallery Crawl...come and see your child's artwork displayed around our classroom!  They will also sing a song about all 5 artists that we learned about.  You can take your child home with you when we are done!
February 16th: Optional Parent Conferences
February 28th 6:30-7:30 PM: Parent Math Night. Be sure to put this date on your calendar! This is an event that you bring your child with you to.  We will have our math workshop stations set up and your child teaches you how to play each game! This is a great way for you to see how we run math workshop and what we are learning currently.  Can't wait to see you there! This is a drop-in event.  Come and leave whenever you need to! 😁

Math:
We are finishing up our geometry unit of 2-D and 3-D shapes! We have worked hard on learning the vocabulary needed to identity and describe the shapes.  We have continued to work on the concept of "one more, one less."  We also studied the "hundreds chart" this week since it was the 100th day of school.  We talked about how it is similar to a number line and helps up with our counting to 100.  On Monday we are starting something new that I LOVE called "range cards."  I assessed the students this week to determine what number they need to start on.  At math night on the 28th, you will be able to see these in action and how they work!  The concept that range cards work on are addition, subtraction, combinations of a number, number writing, and equation writing.  These are such a great math tool for the foundation of addition and subtraction!  We can also differentiate these easily which is great because we have students on all different levels.  Look for more on this in the blog next week!

Literacy:
We have started having more of a set routine and schedule during our literacy time.   On Tuesdays we learn our new sight word for the week and read/color our sight word book.  I also pull some students for guided reading groups on this day.  On Wednesdays we complete a word sort that is either sorting pictures by their initial consonant or by different phonograms.  The type of sort will continue to change each week based on the students progress.  This week I began differentiating this activity and different students were doing different sorts based on their need.  On Thursdays we have writer's workshop and work on the "topic of writing" for the month.  We also started learning our "Beanie Baby Strategies" this week!  I use Beanie Babies to help the students learn different reading strategies for decoding words, comprehension, inferencing, and retelling.  Our first one we learned this week was "Eagle Eye."  Eagle Eye tells us to look at the pictures on the page if there if an unknown word that we need to decode.  We sometimes can figure out the word based on the picture and looking at the first letter in the word.  They did great practicing this strategy!

Thematic:
We began studying the artist Mary Cassatt this week and the main thing that she painted was babies and their moms!  Mrs. Rumburg sketched the pictures that you all sent in and the children got to watercolor the picture.  They are precious! We can't wait for you to see them. :) Mary Cassatt also did imprint paintings! The students painted with tempura paint on a pizza pan and then pressed a piece of construction paper down onto the painting.  They smoothed it out and then peeled back the paper to see their imprint that was made! 

Have a wonderful weekend!
Love,
Mrs. James 

Week Twenty One: January 8th-12th

Hello kindergarten families! Our week in the classroom was wonderful and full of many great learning experiences! We began our "Artist in Me" unit and the first artist we studied was Wassily Kandinsky.  Kandinsky's art mainly consists of shapes including circles, squares, triangles, and lines.  This tied in perfectly with our geometry unit we began this week.  We studied 2-D and 3-D shapes and learned all about sides, vertices, faces, and edges.

Announcements:

January 15th: No school: Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!
January 26th: No school: Teacher Workday
January 29th: No school: Teacher Workday
February 6th 10:00 AM: Artist in Me Gallery Crawl...come and see your child's artwork displayed around our classroom!  They will also sing a song about all 5 artists that we learned about.  We will also have refreshments.
February 13th: Field Trip to the Laurel's Nursing Home (10:30-11:30)
February 14th 1:00 PM: Valentine's Reading Party...come read your child's Valentine's poems with them that they received from other classmates! 

Math:

We began our geometry unit this week in math!  We are studying both 2-D and 3-D shapes.  The 2-D shapes we learned are circle, rectangle, square, triangle, oval, trapezoid, diamond/rhombus, and hexagon.  The 3-D shapes we learned are cone, cube, cylinder, sphere, pyramid, and rectangular prism.  We are working on the students being able to identify, describe, and draw/build these shapes.  We played a game called "What's My Shape?" The students played the game in pairs and one student had a whiteboard and marker and the other student was the guesser.  The student drew a shape on their board without the other student seeing it.  The other student asked questions such as "Does the shape have 4 sides? Does the shape have 6 vertices? Does the shape have 3 vertices?" until they were able to guess the shape.  They LOVED this game!

Literacy:

In literacy this week, we began two new activities including sight word mini-books and word sorts.  As mentioned in the email I sent out on Tuesday, students will learn one sight word per week and that will be our "word of the week".  Each student will then get a sight word book and will go through and highlight that word wherever they see it in the book. We read this book as a class and in small groups multiple times so they should be able to read the book to you when they bring it home.  These books have basic pattern sentences in them where only one or two words change on each page.  This helps the students with being able to read the books and also use the picture to determine the unknown word.  We also started word sorts this week.  This came home on a sheet of computer paper where they sorted pictures into four different letter categories.  We started with this one as a whole class but as we continue each week with these, I will differentiate and students will be doing different ones based on their needs.  This week, students sorted the pictures based off of the initial consonant that the picture started with.  They did great with this activity! 

Thematic:

We began our Artist in Me unit this week with Kandinsky.  Students learned that his artwork included many different shapes.  Students got to recreate three of his pieces of artwork that will be displayed at our gallery crawl.  Students used different art mediums (crayons, colored pencils, paint, etc.) to create their pieces of artwork.  Many of these activities also practice their cutting which is always a great fine motor skill activity.  

Science:

Students got to continue exploring with the classroom science materials (pipettes, test tubes, eye droppers, beakers, and measuring tubes) during morning activities and during free choice centers.  This center is a hit!  Thanks to Sue Sink who came and did our Sci-Fri this past Friday!  We would love for more parents to come and do a science experiment with the class. It does not have to be anything complicated at all. :) Simple is best!

Have a great Sunday!
Love,
Mrs. James 

Week Twenty: January 1st-5th

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful winter break and had fun spending time with family and friends!  I had a great break but I was excited to get back and see all of our sweet kiddos.  We had a great week back in kindergarten!  We have slowly eased back into things and the kids are doing awesome.  Next week we will begin to kick things into high gear as we begin a new thematic unit (Artist in Me), focus heavily on sight words and reading, and begin new math concepts (place value, addition,  subtraction).  After winter break, we take things up a notch in all academic areas but specifically in reading and writing.  By this point, the students have all of the other things in kindergarten down smoothly (unpacking, packing up, organizing their cubbies, and all other daily routines) so we focus heavily on academics.  We continue looking at where they need to be going into first grade and keep that in the front of our mind as our goal.  Be on the lookout next week for emails regarding new things we are implementing in the classroom such as guided reading books and sight word books.  I am excited to begin the new year and see the students continue to succeed! 😊

January 15th: Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day...no school!
January 26th: No school: We host a conference at CSD for other schools/teachers to attend.
January 29th: No school: Teacher Workday
February 13th: Field Trip to the Laurel's Nursing Home (10:30-11:30)

***In a few weeks, we will study Mary Cassatt (a famous artist) and 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 and them!  It would be great if the mom is holding the baby in the picture.  Please send this in by January 16th. :) Your original picture will be returned exactly the way it was 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.  I mainly was thinking of lids (plastic water bottle lids, jar lids, container lids, etc.) Below is a picture to help you brainstorm.  Please send these in by Monday or Tuesday if you have them. Thanks so much!

                                                     

Math:

In math this week, we began a new game that has been added to our Morning Meeting called "Magic Number."  Each morning, one student gets to pick a number between 1-100.  That number becomes our magic number for the day.  We determine what is one more (before), one less (after), we spell the word, we build the word using C-rods and cubes, and talk about the place value of the number.  Below is an example for a visual.

Literacy:

In literacy this week, I introduced a new activity called "read the room, write the room."  This would be very easy to replicate at home and VERY helpful in your child learning how to read and write sight words. We have 40 sight words written on index cards and hung around the room.  Each student gets a clipboard, piece of blank paper, and a pencil and they walk around the room and read a sight word and then write it. They continue to do this until they have all 40 written on their sheet (secretly working on counting at the same time 😉).  In order to differentiate and make it more challenging, I had some students write the sight words in different "boxes" based on how many letters were in the word.  Here is the link to the Dolch Sight Words (kindergarten list) that you can write on index cards and hang around your child's room or house.  Exposure to these words is so critical in them being able to read! http://www.sightwords.com/pdfs/word_lists/dolch_kindergarten.pdf Once they have mastered this list (being able to read them all and write them without seeing the spelling) you can move onto the first grade list.

Thematic:

Next week we will begin in our Artist in Me unit!  We will study five famous artists including Michelangelo, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Juan Miro, and Wassily Kandinsky.  We will start off with Kandinksy!

Science:

Today in Sci-Fri, students got to rotate through four science activity tables.  They got to explore many different science tools including beakers, test tubes, and eye droppers.  These items will be available to them at free choice centers so they can continue investigating with them!

Have a great weekend!
Love,
Mrs. James

Week Eighteen: December 11th-15th

Happy Holidays! ⛄ I hope that you all have a great winter break and holiday season! This will be my last blog of 2017 and I look forward to all that is to come in 2018!   I will not be here next Monday and Tuesday and will miss seeing all of you at the Gingerbread House party!  My family has always dreamed of going to New York City at Christmas time (I have never been to NYC at all) and my parents surprised me, my husband, and my sisters and they are taking us on Saturday!  I will miss you all but I know you will have fun on Tuesday in our classroom.

December 19th at 1:00 PM Gingerbread Houses in our classroom: Parents are invited to come and make a gingerbread house with your child.  Siblings are fine to come but we will not have enough supplies for them to make a gingerbread house.  This would be a great time for you to have special one-on-one time with your kindergartener but we understand getting babysitters can be hard at times.
January 3rd: School resumes after winter break

Over the past three weeks, we studied Sinterklaas, Las Posadas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas.  We have had so much fun learning about each country and the holiday that they celebrate.  We compared and contrasted to see what was similar and different about each holiday.  Today we had our Polar Express day to celebrate Christmas!  We drank hot chocolate and read The Polar Express, we colored and read a mini-book, we talked about the steps to make homemade crockpot hot chocolate, we made reindeer food, and we did a science experiment that involved ice and trains! Ask your child about it to find out more. :)

Have a wonderful winter break! I am so thankful for all of you and your sweet children!
Love,
Mrs. James

Week Sixteen: November 27th-December 1st

Happy December!  We had a fun week in the classroom starting our "Holidays Around the World" unit!  This week we studied Christmas in the Netherlands (Sinterklaas).  We compared and contrasted their Christmas traditions to our Christmas in the United States.

We also had our first trip to the Laurel's Nursing Home and both the residents and students loved it!  Our students were amazing with the residents and definitely brightened up their day!  We started off by singing Christmas/Holiday songs and the residents joined in with us.  Students then rotated through different stations where they interacted with the residents.  The stations were holiday painting, Christmas card making, holiday pattern block puzzles, holiday coloring pages, and holiday poke art.  It was so much fun watching the students interact with the residents and they are excited and ready to go back!  We will go back February 13th and April 10th.

***Please send in a baby picture of your child by next Tuesday (Dec 5th).  We are going to use it for our holiday door decoration.  We will not cut it and will return it safely when we are done.
***Please save and send in your quart sized half & half cartons or any other cartons similar to this size for our gingerbread houses.  We need 21 by December 19th! 😁 See picture below.

December 5th: PAJAMA DAY! We have been learning about Sinterklaas and Christmas in the Netherlands this week and Sinterklaas visits children on December 5th.  We are going to put our shoes in the hallway with carrots and hay in them (what the children in The Netherlands do) and hope that Sinterklaas leaves us a treat! 😉 We thought it would be fun to have a pajama day paired with this.  Your child may wear their pajamas to school but please have them still wear their tennis shoes. No stuffed animals (I have already had kids ask so I am sure they will ask you too haha)
December 19th 1:00 PM Gingerbread Houses: Come and decorate a gingerbread house with your child! We will ask for supplies as we get closer to the date.

Math:

The main math concepts we worked on this week are "one more, one less", basic addition, and counting on. We added a few new centers to our math workshop this week with two being "Race to 20" and "Race to 50."  These games have started circulating home this week in our "take home math game bags."  These games work on counting on and addition.  Your child should be able to explain to you how to play. :)  We are also really working on number writing!  Reversals are still very common developmentally at this point but we are working as hard as we can in the classroom on this.  Whenever you see reversals at home, just ask them to flip it around and fix it.  I have also been completing the state based mid-year math assessments to see where we students are and what we need to focus on for the second half of the year.

Literacy:

We have seen so much progress with the students and their knowledge of their letters, sounds, sight words, and phonetic spelling!  They are continuing to rotate through their reader's workshop centers that practice all of these things.  After the holiday break, we will start focusing heavily on sight words.  We will learn a few sight words a week and they will start receiving mini-books for each sight word to bring home to practice reading.  These books really help students who haven't begun reading yet and help build confidence for those who are already reading. Look for these in the weeks to come!  ***Please have your child make a book box to keep all of these in if they haven't already.  This is a great box to pull from when they need to read a book on their own!

Thematic:

This week during thematic centers we learned about Christmas in the Netherlands!  We learned all about Sinterklaas and talked about the differences between Christmas in the Netherlands and Christmas in the USA.  The students rotated through three different stations to learn more about Sinterklaas and The Netherlands.  They made a headband and had to match up Christmas pictures to the correct word, they illustrated a book with facts, and they used their creative side to make their own "klompen."  You can see these hung in the hallway. :) 

Science:

During our science time, we are focusing on the scientific method and introducing all of the steps to the students.  Today, our Sci-Fri experiment was making snowflake crystals using Borax!  Each table got to make one snowflake as a team out of pipe cleaners and then we put the snowflake in a mixture of boiling water and Borax.  We will observe them today and when we come back to school on Monday to see if the crystal has formed on the pipe cleaners!

Have a great weekend!

Love,

Mrs. James

Week Thirteen and Fourteen: November 6th-17th

Happy Friday! It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving is next week. 🦃 We began our Thanksgiving activities today and will continue them next week leading up to our feast!  We are having many conversations about all of the things that we are thankful for.  Below are upcoming dates and then a review of our week.

November 21st Thanksgiving Feast for the kids.  No need to pack them a lunch! Send a snack as usual.  If you have signed up to send in food, please bring it Tuesday morning (in a crockpot would be best so we can plug it in and keep it warm)
November 22nd-24th: No school...Happy Thanksgiving!
December 19th 1:00 PM Gingerbread Houses: Come and decorate a gingerbread house with your child! We will ask for supplies as we get closer to the date.

Self Portraits: Last Thursday, we began working on self-portraits that will be hung around the classroom for the duration of kindergarten and first grade.  We read an amazing book called The Colors of Us and in this book it allows the children to explore all the different skin colors and tones of other people.  We learned that instead of calling people "white", "black", "brown", "tan", etc. we can name our skin tones beautiful names.  Some of the names that we came up with (and some are from the book) are vanilla, caramel, mocha, cinnamon, chocolate, honey, coffee toffee, vanilla icing, and white chocolate.  We then talked about how all of our skin tones and colors are made up of the same mixture of colors (yellow, red, brown, white, and black).  Each student then got to choose a paint color (that Mrs. Rumburg mixed) that matched their skin tone.  They then painted their faces and their ears for their self portraits. This was such a beautiful activity to watch the students do and they were each so excited to pick a beautiful name for their skin tone.  :)

Math: The main concepts that we are focusing on in math right now are counting on, subitizing (recognizing an arrangement of dots immediately like on a dice or domino), basic addition, ten frames, and one more.  We are playing math games during math workshop that focus on all of these skills.  Some of the games played are Ten Frame War, One More, and Domino Parking Lot.

Literacy: It is so exciting seeing the students progress with their letters and sounds and move to the beginning stages of reading!  Reader's workshop looks different for each student because everyone is usually doing different things to fit their needs.  Students are being called for Handwriting Without Tears, some students are being pulled for guided reading groups, some students are writing at the writing table, and some students are rotating through games to practice letters/sounds/sight words/handwriting.  This allows us to pull students to work on their individual needs based on their reading and writing.  Come and volunteer one day if you would like to see what this looks like for us!

Thematic: We finished our unit on Creepy Crawlies this week!  It was fun going on the field trip to the Raptor Center so that we could see some of what we learned about in real life.  We studied bats, spiders, snakes, ants, owls, and more!  We began learning about Thanksgiving this week and are doing lots of different Thanksgiving activities.  When we get back from Thanksgiving break, we will begin our Holidays Around the World unit!  We will study Christmas, Hanukkah, Las Posadas, Kwanzaa, and Sinterklaas.

Have a great weekend!
Love,
Mrs. James 💕