Week of September 18-22

Friday was fun with students running the obstacle course in the afternoon! It was great to see so many parents come and watch their children participate. This week is a short week with no school for students on Friday.

Our first field trip is scheduled for Friday, October 20th. We will be riding the bus to Lowell Ranch in Castle Rock to visit the ranch and participate in the Fall Harvest Tour hosted by CALF(Colorado Agricultural Leadership Foundation). Permission forms will be coming home in Thursday Folders this week.

Scholastic Book Clubs orders are due by 10/06/17. You can place your orders online at scholastic.com/bookclubs using my class activation code: MGLTM

Here is what we are learning this week:

Literacy

In Superkids, we are learning about letter Aa. Our character is Alf which is short for Alfalfa. We are learning to encode for /a/ as well as write both the uppercase and lowercase Aa on the ice cream paper. As we learn each new letter, we continue to review letters and sounds from previous lessons every day.

Click below to watch and listen to Alf's song:

Alf's Song with Animation

During Writer's Workshop, we are learning how to manage our writing pieces in our writing folders as well as beginning to work right away. Students are learning that they don't always finish a writing activity in one day. Often times, they have to come back and finish a piece of work from a previous lesson. Folders are organized with a green dot side for incomplete items and a red dot side for complete items. With these structures, students are learning to work for extended periods of time and also the beginning of organizational skills.

Math

Students engage in counting numbers above 5, namely 6, 7, and 8 in varied configurations. The students use their growing skill and knowledge of counting up to five to reason about larger numbers in the more difficult linear, array, circular, and scattered configurations. As in previous topics the students will count objects and match their count with a digit card to reinforce that the last number said when counting tells the number of objects.

In Lessons 19 and 20, students will count linking cubes. They will match objects with the numeral 7 and count on fingers from 1 to 7.

Science

This week we are wrapping up our 5 Senses Unit with an apple investigation. We will be using all of our senses to explore apples. We will learn about graphing, counting, sorting, labeling the parts of an apple as well as how apples grow.

Social Studies

Have you ever wondered about Discovery Time or have seen pictures of your child in pretend play and wondered, "Why is my child playing in kindergarten?" Discovery Time is a great opportunity for children to put into practice the social skills we have taught! As students participate in Discovery activities they are learning to make and manage choices independently, share, take turns, invite others to play, communicate and cooperate, solve problems, express creativity and take responsibility. The theme this month is Fall Harvest. I will be uploading pictures on Seesaw for you to see the fun things your children are doing.

Upcoming Dates