February 14th, 2011
Dear Parents,
Happy Valentine’s Day! Thanks to our moms who helped put our party together for this afternoon! Remember that love is the greatest gift we have ever been given, the love of a savior to die on the cross for us. 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’ll continue to learn about our presidents and our country this week.
Our Bible lessons will center on the Good Samaritan. Our memory verse is Matthew 22:39 “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.
I have been noticing the students either don’t have their homework bags or their book in it when it is their turn to read with me. Please keep these in their backpacks EVERY night. I do my best to get to each student at least every other day. Keep practicing those fast words that is in their homework bag. Just do a few a night either pointing and reading or writing and saying the words.
We have been doing a lot of writing lately either in our writer’s workshop or our journals. They are learning so much, but it may still be hard to read or very short. This is okay. The most important part right now is that they all think of themselves as writers and they enjoy writing! Encourage any writing you can at home, too! One little sentence a day of their choosing, can help reinforce many skills – using capitals at the beginning, punctuation at the end, space between words, knowing that those fast words they’ve been learning can be spelled without stretching them out, but any other words can be stretched out to hear as many sounds as possible. That one little sentence a day is very powerful practice!
We are playing many math games that require accurate counting, comparing and adding or subtracting one or two. They are starting to figure out how to add or subtract one to another number. The signs are very tricky as this is the first they have been introduced to them. We often work story problems that they must figure out whether with will join or separate the 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. 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!
Here are a few dates to remember:
•Lutheran School’s Week is coming up, March 6th through the 11th! We’ll be sending home a schedule for this fun week soon!
•Spring Break, March 21st
•No School for Kindergarteners on March 18th and 25th for Kindergarten screening.
•No school for Easter on Thursday, April 21st, through Monday, April 25th.
God’s blessings on your week!
Natalie Graumann