It's hard to believe April is over already! We have one full month of kindergarten left, and then it's off to first grade!
We had a busy week, and we are looking towards more important work next week.
Upcoming week:
Monday and Tuesday: Kindergateners will take the spring MAP test. This is a great opportunity for students to show their growth. It is a fine balance between reinforcing how important it is to always do your best and be a careful thinker and stressing out over a test. Please encourage your kindergartener to do their best, take their time, and remember that they have learned a LOT this year!
Saturday: CHPCS PTA Spring Gala Auction! This is the major fundraiser for the year, and proceeds have helped purchase vital items for our school, including our new sound system! Buy your tickets and bring your friends! Until charter schools receive equal funding as neighborhood schools, we heavily rely upon fundraisers to meet the financing needs of running a school.
Riggs:
We will hopefully get through the spelling words nut through Pete. We will be exploring the important first job of Silent Final E: working through the consonant to make the vowel say its name. It is the difference between fat and fate, kit and kite, not and note. This will open up a whole new set of words for us to read!
Saxon 1 Math:
Ordering events by time; making an organized list to solve a problem; subtracting a number from 10 (the complement to Friends of Ten, and the beginning of the concept of fact families); identifying dozen and half dozen; estimating and measuring distances using feet; addition facts: adding 9 (here's the trick: add ten, then subtract one).
Core Knowledge:
We will begin our final major unit for the year: plants! We will also be working on putting together our Mothers' Day gifts and our thank you gift for our student teacher.
We are starting our LAST cycle of Show and Tell. This month's theme: look how much we've grown! The schedule is posted in the classroom, and was sent home earlier this week in hard copy. Please help your kindergartener think of a way they have grown this school year. This could be bringing in a tooth they lost, a pair of pants that doesn't fit them anymore, a drawing from the beginning of the year and one they've done recently (or a writing sample), a book they can read, a demonstration of shoe tying, etc.
Week in review:
Riggs:
We practiced reading and spelling many words that are closely related; on the back of Riggs homework pages each night you can see some of the excellent lists and have your kindergartener read them to you. We studied the words bee, be (homophones!), out, of, red, bad, old.
Kindergarteners have an additional (yes! another one!) component of homework each night: glued in the Friday section of their planners is a list of 20 high frequency words. We practice them in class, and they should also practice reading them out loud each night. Thank you for helping your child grow towards fluent and confident reading!
Click here to find a .pdf of the high-frequency word list(s) in many different formats, including printable flash cards. Click here for the second 100 high frequency words (.pdf).
IEW (Institute for Excellence in Writing):
We wrote friendly letters to friends and family far away and sent our Flat Stanleys out on adventures.
Saxon 1 Math:
Counting nickels and pennies (this was hard!), counting nickels (this was easy!), measuring and drawing line segments to the nearest inch (this was ok!), drawing congruent shapes and designs, estimating and measuring lengths using nonstandard units (like paperclips), comparing the size of the unit and the number of units used to measure the object (it takes fewer large paperclips to measure a line segment than it does using small paperclips).
Most of the students struggled in counting nickels and pennies. I encourage you to provide many informal opportunities to practice this skill (while you are waiting somewhere, or tell the Tooth Fairy to give money in nickels, pennies, and dimes, etc.). Students were tripped up switching from fives to ones: 5, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18.
Core Knowledge:
This week we focused on our Flat Stanleys and some math concepts.
