Dear Kindergarten Parents and Families,

Here we are back to school! I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter Sunday and a great week of vacation. As we return to academics this week our focus is centered on Jesus and how he gave his life for us. Our religion text, Chapter 19  Seeds Are Good, which tells us the mystery of life and death through a poem about a seed. We can relate signs of new life in our garden,  which was planted the first day of spring.

→ Poems for the speech contest are due Wednesday of this week, we will practice each day after lunch. Please send in a poem for your child to practice in class. I will select five students to represent our class in the contest. Kindergarten students are not required to recite poems as an assignment, although I would like to see them put forth the effort and give it a try.

Water is our focus in science, Wednesday  a lab is planned on the states of water.   Along with learning about water, we would like to build a water wheel. We need corks and empty 2 liter soda bottles.

Earth Day is coming!  -we need clean gallon milk containers    and  newspapers! Our class will reuse recycled materials          to make a catching game. I have brought in a few milk jugs…for those who do not use gallon size containers.

We are about finished with the chapter on time. Continue to tell time and use vocabulary at home: digital and analog clocks, hour hand and minute hand. Measurement and money is our next chapter in math. Vocabulary used will be lighter, heavier weights, longer and shorter lengths, and capacity, holds more, holds less. We will use pennies, nickels, and dimes as we learn to identifying coins and count money.

Language Arts has us continue to work on simple CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant) with short vowels, ‘a’, ‘i’, and ‘o’. Focus letters for beginning sounds are: /d/,/b/, /f/, /z/. Ending letters to listen for are: /g/, /t/, and /n/. Writing sentences with word family (CVC words), sight words, describing words, and always using correct sentence structure. We will continue to work hard on letter formation and remember when to use lower and upper case letters.  → Reading strategy for this week is to organize our thoughts as we summarize stories we read. Responding and reflecting to stories after we read, helps us with comprehension.

Lots to do this week! We will be checking out library books on Tuesday.  Thank all of you for returning books before our break.

This Friday is a noon dismissal.

Have a nice sunny week!

Mrs. Carol Brown