February 14, 2011 Knowing Jesus, Growing in Faith, Serving God’s Children
Dear Parents,

Happy Valentine’s Day! Watch for parent valentines today. They wrote you a letter on the back. They’re keepers! This will be a short but busy week! With conferences on Friday afternoon we dismiss at 11:15 on Friday. Next Monday is off for President’s Day. We will be learning about our Presidents, especially Lincoln and Washington.

Our Bible lessons will center on the Good Samaritan. Our memory verses are from Matthew 22:37 and 39”Love the Lord your god with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We had fun learning about the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer last week and hoped they shared that with you. Have them explain what each heart on their poster means. It helps them remember what each part of the Lord’s Prayer means.

We are playing many math games that require accurate counting, comparing and adding or subtracting one or two. They are getting quite good at adding or subtracting one to another number. Playing that binder game really helps them understand what the symbol is telling them to do and gets them ready for symbolic math up ahead. This week’s math game, “Build It, Change It” goes back to an old game, but with a new twist. Play it with your child. I’ll have it ready to put in the binders on Tuesday so they can go right back home. No new game next week. We often work story problems that they must figure out whether they will join or separate groups. They get to share their way of solving problems. It is fascinating to see the different ways they solve problems. Try asking simple problems using numbers up to about 12. Let them use small items if they want, or paper and pencil.

Now that we are done working with individual alphabet letters we begin having fun with vowels and other phonetic skills. We’ll learn about blends and diagraphs, and word families and much more. This week we’ll really work with the short a sound and lots of word families that have that sound. Often lessons will be informal, as they come up! One day we discovered compound words, and we now have a whole poster of them that they found themselves in their reading! You can do the same thing when reading at home. If something pops out at you just explain it simply to them. Even if they don’t master something they love being introduced to it! Not many Kindergarteners understand the suffix “ing” like this class does! They also discovered apostrophes! They won’t always use them correctly yet, but they are being introduced.

Here are a few dates to remember: Half day for In-service, March 8th, No School for Kindergarteners on March 19th and 26th for Kindergarten screening. No school for Easter on Thursday, April 1st, through Monday, April 5th. Lutheran School’s Week is coming up, too, March 7th through the 13th! We’ll be sending home a schedule for this fun week soon!

I will be gone next Tuesday and Wednesday. They are excited to see Mrs. Al Haj again. She substituted for Mrs. Graumann in January.

I forgot to send the paper copy of the book order last week! So it’s in today’s folder and I’ll wait until Wednesday evening to order. Please send orders back tomorrow or Wednesday, or order online! Thank you for your patience! Information for ordering online is on the back of this note. If you’ve done it before you just automatically go there when you get to the website.

God’s blessings on your week!

Roxi