Announcements
Don't Forget: Camp Elim Paperwork: Ms. Sam, our adventure education coordinator, has asked that all families submit their Camp Elim paperwork by April 14st. *Here is a link to the Voyage Form Cover Sheet that has links to the online forms. *Here is the SPRING VOYAGE GEAR LIST: GRADE K for your reference.
Take Home Folders: Please take note of all the items coming home in Take Home Folders today:
-Narrative Writing from January to March. We are clearing out our blue writing folders to make room for our new unit on Opinion Writing. Please celebrate their amazing growth as writers at home!
-Math Quiz and Family Letter
-Easter Egg Coloring
-Phonics Work
-and more!
Spring Climbing: Mr. Doug announced Spring Climbing dates. Our crew will be climbing on April 25, 27, & 28th from 1:45-2:35. If you have been trained, please sign up to belay. Thanks! https://www.signupgenius.com/
Scholastic News:
Class Order Due Date: 4/9
Shop Our Class Page: https://orders.scholastic.com/YCRBR
Shop Digital Flyers for Our Grade with Your Child: https://clubs.scholastic.com/kindergarten
***All orders also earn FREE Books for our class. I love that our crew library grows from every order that is placed! Thank you for your support!
Class Code: YCRBR
-Letter & Number Formation Volunteers (M, Tu, & Th 8:30-9)
-Reading Volunteers (M, Tu, Th, Fri 9:25-9:50)
-Teacher Helper Volunteers (at home projects- Friday; in-classroom helper Friday morning; and iPad helper Friday afternoon)
Calendar
Crew Highlights
Learning Update:
In reading, we have begun Unit 8 on Weather and Seasons. Hooray that our Benchmark Curriculum matches up with our current expedition. Our essential question for this unit is: How do our lives change with the seasons? This week's weather has given us a lot to talk about! Our focus lessons are about cause & effect, identifying the central idea, and using context cluse to understand the meaning of unknown words. *Practice finding examples of cause and effect in the books you read together. Then practice identifying cause and effect in regular life- so that kids can make connections to this new learning.
In Writing, we have been working on Opinion Writing. Using a mentor text, students worked all week on a writing piece that has an opinion, three reasons why, and ends with restating the opinion. Wow! They are doing terrific with this! We used the book Facts vs. Opinion vs. Robots to talk about how facts can be proven and optinion are thoughts and feelings. This led to a great conversation about how it is okay to have different opinions and how we can be kind when someone has a different opinion. *Make mental notes about likes and dislikes that might be fun to write about next week.
In Phonics, our letter of the week was K, and we added look and me to our sight word list. We studied the word family -it: kit, sit, lit, hit, bit, fit, and so on. We practiced sounding words out to spell, such as kit, kim, ken, and kid. *Here are our latest sight words.
In math, we are working on Adding within 10. This unit has been very supportive with manipulatives, objects, pictures, equations, and 10 frames. Repeated work with 10 frames leads to the ability to quickly visualize numbers as amounts, which is important for building addition skills. *I encourage flashcards or talking through story problems at home to gain familiarity with adding math facts 0-10.
In Expedition, we focused on learning about the sun. We read some fantastic books, in which students were sponges for all the interesting facts! They wrote about these in their Weather Journals, in which we have been recording the weather of the day. This week's expedition challenge was titled: Don't Let the Ice Melt! Students used classroom materials to design a shade structure. On Thursday, we tested these out. After 2 hours in the sun, some ice cubes were still whole and some were half their size. How fun! We had an excellent debrief circle about shade structure choices (wood, Magnatiles, open sides, closed, etc.) and results. We will talk about this again next week to determine what changes might be made to improve their shade structure and make more connections to how this relates to our learning about the sun. *Tell me a new fact you learned about the sun.
