UPCOMING SPECIAL EVENTS
On Tuesday, May 13th, we will take a Kindergarten class trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. This museum has some fascinating collections that kindergartners always enjoy!
We are also looking forward to Fitness for Life Day on Friday, May 23rd. Fitness for Life is a day when all Horace Mann students spend the duration of the school day (8:35 to 12:30 for kindergarten) at an off-site location, Auburndale Cove, in Auburndale. The school provides bus transportation, Mr. Tynes runs many fun athletic and fitness events for the kids, and the PTO provides hamburgers, veggie burgers and hot dogs for lunch. Our room parents will contact you about donating items or money for lunch. This is a great opportunity to celebrate health and wellness.
BALANCED LITERACY
Phonics: This month in Fundations we will learn the following letters and their sounds: Zz-zebra-/z/ and Qu qu-queen-/qu/. We will focus on consonant- vowel- consonant words, or “rubber band” words and we will continue to practice “tapping out” these simple, three sound words. We will also learn the sounds of “sh”, “ch”, “th”. Using this strategy will help us to write and sound out new words. The students are enjoying building and breaking down the sounds in these words.
Independent Reading: Independent reading continues this month. We are working on following a pattern, looking at the initial and final consonants, and noticing punctuation. We are also watching carefully for word wall words as we read. We are also thinking about what we read and trying to retell the story in our head (or to a teacher) and reading with a smooth voice (fluently).
Writing: We will be starting a big kindergarten writing project this month, as we will begin publishing our own books. The children will choose one of their favorite stories from their writing folder or start a new story and turn it into a published book. During the publishing process, we will be thinking about making our stories complete, clear, and interesting. Kindergartners will think about what the reader wants to know as they “fix and fancy” their story. We will also be thinking about making a story easy to read by putting spaces between words, writing words with lots of sounds and writing words that match the illustrations.
You will have a chance to enjoy our published books at the June K Drop-In on Thursday, June 12th. Mark your calendars; we really hope that every family can make it to this Drop-In!
MATHEMATICS
With our Apple Boxes unit, we continue practicing and building automaticity with creating combinations for a given number. We are working towards being able to fluently add and subtract within 5 and being able to figure out the combinations of 10.
To support these goals, we continue to work on counting, addition, and subtraction using various games and activities. We are working on visualizing numbers by seeing them in a “ten frame”. For instance, a student might see 7 as “5 and then 2 more” or as “3 less than 10”. Facility with small numbers and making meaning of them in the context of ten is an important building block of number sense and for operations.
SCIENCE
Ladybugs
We have begun a unit on ladybugs as a part of our “Living Things” curriculum. We have enjoyed observing the ladybug larvae in our classroom. We will soon have the opportunity to observe ladybug larvae as they transform into pupae and then ladybugs. Over the course of this study, we will review what living things need, learn about the life cycle and much more! As scientists, we will predict, observe and record.
Chicks
We will also be getting fertilized eggs, which will be in an incubator in our classroom. While we wait out the 21 days for the chicks to hatch, there is much to do. We will examine eggs inside and out (non-fertilized eggs from the grocery store) and look for the yolk, the thick and thin albumen, the membrane, the air space, the chalaza, and the white spot. The kindergartners will record their observations with careful drawings. We will also examine the incubator and discuss what it does. We will read books about chick embryo development as well as talk about other animals that lay eggs. It is all very exciting, and we hope that all will go well inside the incubator. We will discuss the possibility of no eggs hatching (it happens). Between all 3 classes, we hope to have enough chicks to share! Once the chicks hatch, we will read about chicks, observe and draw chicks, sing chick songs and read chick poems, and do some chick art projects. This is such an exciting part of Kindergarten!
SOCIAL STUDIES
We are enjoying learning about each other through our unit Our Human Family/Celebrating Families through our “Person of the Week” program. Please let me know if you don’t remember when your child’s week is. We are also observing signs of spring for our Sensational Season of Spring unit!
Person of the Week:
Jake
Finn
Neel
Sean
Bushra
Troy
Steven
Elia
Peter
Andre
Aaron
