January 19

Dear Fish Families:

The 100th day of school is fast approaching! In celebration of this big day, all of the kindergarten classes will be participating in a service project. We are hoping each child will bring in 1 can of food. Mr. Fosher will be helping us to count the 100 cans in different ways and we will then donate them to a food bank. We would like to have the cans sent in by 2/2/15. Thanks for your support with this!

Here are some highlights from the past week:

Writers' Workshop:  The children have been writing list books. We began writing "The" books (The pencil. The paper. The markers.) and moved on to "I see..." books. We started reading list books that have a twist (an ending that changes). The children can identify the twists in books and some of them are beginning to apply this technique to their writing.

Readers' Workshop:  The children continue to read independently and in partners. They are making connections, thinking and talking about books. We are revisiting what Readers' Workshop looks and sounds like since the children seemed to need reminders this week. 

Literacy: We worked on lowercase v and w this week during handwriting. Our Words Their Way sorts are continuing. Some children revisited rhyming, some worked on long and short vowels, and others continued with initial consonant sorts. I was able to visit a first grade classroom during their WTW time. The class I saw glued their spelling sort into a booklet to keep as a reference when reading/writing. I loved this idea and plan to use it with the fish! Mrs. Quinn assessed the children on how many sight words they can read. They continue to make progress. Please keep reviewing these important high frequency words at home.
 
Math:  The children have been working on the different ways to show the numbers 5 and 6 using 2 different colored unifix cubes. Building these different combinations will lead to an understanding of addition problems as the year progresses.  
   
Visual Arts:  We made melting snow people this week. 

Book of the Week:  The Mitten Tree by Candace Christiansen

Donation requests:

• sandwich bags (Ziploc type)
• snack bags (Ziploc type)

Up Coming Events:

• Word of Week- can
• Handwriting-t & a
• Phonics- superstar i
• Progress Reports sent home-1/30/15
• 1 can of food- 2/2/15
• Early release- 2/4/15

Fondly,

Kristen