I hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving weekend with family and friends!

This week we will wrap up our unit on families.  By the end of the week, we will begin a fun unit on hibernation and bears!  We will read many different fiction and nonfiction stories.  The nonfiction books will help us identify facts as we learn all about bears. The fiction stories will help us to identify the main characters, the setting, and the beginning, middle, and end of different stories.  Some of the stories we will read are Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Bear Snores On, Polar Bear, Polar Bear, and the different versions of Goldilocks and The Three Bears.  We also work on many different projects and activities to go along with this unit.

During math, we will finish our unit on patterns.  We will then go back to working on numbers 11-20.  We will practice reading, writing, and showing these numbers in many different ways.  These skills will be worked on throughout the entire school year.

As readers and writers, we will continue working on our Daily Five activities.  The children really look forward to choosing their literacy activities during the day.  We are trying hard to build our independence during this time.  We are also beginning to add sight words to our Word Wall.  We have been practicing reading and writing sight words, but we will now add them to our Word Wall.  We will call them 'heart words' because these are words that we should 'know by heart'.  They are not words that should be stretched or sounded out.  The first three words are I, a, and the.  We will add two or three words each week until the end of the school year.  Practice reading and writing these words at home too! :)

I am looking forward to another great week of kindergarten fun in our classroom!

Sincerely,
Mrs. Eileen Browne