I hope you all enjoyed your long weekend with family and friends. We are now officially heading into the final stretch of our school year, but we are not finished with our kindergarten learning!

This week we will continue to learn about the ocean and sea creatures. So far we have learned about crabs, jellyfish, seahorses, fish, and sea stars. Today we began learning all about sea turtles. The children are very anxious to learn about whales and sharks too! We have been having so much fun with this interesting unit and have been incorporating all that we have learned into our reading and writing activities too.

During math, we have been learning all about measuring. We have been using many different kinds of materials to measure objects in our classroom. We have measured the length and height of various objects using crayons, markers, cubes, and paperclips each day. We will also begin exploring weight and capacity this week. These concepts will fit nicely with our science unit as well.

As writers, we have begun wrapping up our poetry unit. The children and I have had so much fun exploring poetry. We read poems and even wrote our own. I have been typing some of the children's poems. They love to see their writing in print and I am so very proud of their work! Their poems are absolutely precious.

During reading, we continue to work on our Daily Five Literacy choices. We are also learning about D.E.A.R. time (Drop Everything And Read) during the day. Now that we are all readers, we are working on finding a quiet spot in the room and curling up with our books as we practice for first grade! We have grown so much since the beginning of the school year. We also continue to practice our Word Wall words each day. We now have 54 words on our wall! I will send home a copy of our words this week so that you can practice reading these words at home too.

As always please feel free to contact me any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Eileen Browne

PS Our kindergarten graduation will take place on Thursday, June 14th at 9:30. It will be a short celebration with some songs and a morning snack for the children. I look forward to seeing you there!

Glue Sticks Needed

We have been creating many projects throughout the year and are constantly depleting our glue stick supplies. It would be greatly appreciated if each child could bring in at least two large glue sticks for their supply boxes. We have been doing a terrific job sharing our supplies, but we still need more. Thanks so much! :)

Happy Mother's Day!

I hope you all had a terrific weekend and enjoyed your Mother's Day with family and friends. The children worked very hard on their writing and projects for this special day. I hope you enjoyed sharing them as much as we enjoyed making them. I especially liked our class poem the things that moms love. We could have gone on and on with our ideas! :) We have been spending some time learning about poetry and writing our own poems. The children love the idea of picking a topic and writing lists and words into poems. We will spend some more time this week creating kindergarten poems during writing workshop. We created a kindergarten 'Think Spring' bulletin board in the front hallway with some of our writing and artwork. Check it out if you are in the building! This week we will continue working in small guided reading groups during our literacy work stations. The children are all reading books at different levels, but we are working on some of the same strategies. We are working on story mapping while we read~ Who are the main characters? What is the setting? Is there a problem in the story? And what is the solution? The children are doing a great job talking about these concepts as readers. During math we completed a short unit on composing and decomposing numbers 11 - 20. We will continue learning about these numbers, but we will also begin a short math unit on measurement as well. During science we will begin a unit on water play. This will go along with all of the learning we are doing about oceans and sea creatures. We are having a lot of fun working on projects, reading, and writing all about the sea. Reminders: Tuesday, May 15th: District Budget Voting and Kids Vote Too! Bring your child to vote and he/she will be able to vote on a new snack choice in the cafeteria. Also, the May Family Timeline projects are due on Thursday, May 17th or by the end of the week. This is the last family project of the school year! Kindergarten T-shirt orders are also due this week. The cost of the shirt is $10.00. Please let me know if you need a new order form. We are looking forward to another great week of kindergarten learning! As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns. Sincerely, Eileen Browne