Welcome to Kindergarten!

I hope you are having a terrific summer! I have been busy spending time with my family. We have spent a lot of time swimming and visiting with family and friends. I am also busy reading and planning all of the fun things we will learn about in kindergarten!

I will use this blog throughout the school year to remind you and your family of upcoming events and learning activities. It will be a great way to communicate. We will be saving paper at the same time. Be sure to bookmark this page and to check our classroom blog weekly!

Enjoy the rest of your summer. Have fun! I'll see you soon. :)

Sincerely,
Mrs. Browne

Thank You!

We had a terrific Field Day today. The weather was absolutely perfect for our day outside. The children and I had so much fun participating in the many different activities throughout the day. As you could tell when your child arrived home, we had a lot of fun getting wet during our last station...water relay races! The children should definitely sleep well tonight! :)

I wanted to take a moment to thank you all for your support during the school year, for helping with our many celebrations and activities, and for the generous gift I received today from the class. I am very proud of your children and will truly miss them next year as they move on to first grade. I hope you all have a fantastic summer! Read, write, play, and stay safe.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Eileen Browne :)

Kindergarten Graduation!

It is hard to believe that the end of the school year is here. I am so very proud of how much we have grown as individuals and as a classroom community since September. Though we only have a few days left, we are still very busy reading, writing, singing, creating projects, and participating in our Kindergarten Countdown activities each day!

Our Kindergarten Graduation will take place this Thursday at 9:30 in the cafeteria. The orange graduation t-shirts have arrived! The kindergarten teachers will help put the t-shirts on when the children arrive to school on Thursday morning. We will send the shirts home at the end of the day. During the graduation, the children will sing a few songs and then go back to the classrooms for a refreshing snack. These activities will last until approximately 10:30. We are looking forward to a fun morning!

Please feel free to contact me with any questions. I will see you soon.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Eileen Browne :)

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

Thank you for coming to our Kindergarten Dinosaur Exhibit. The children were so excited to show off their projects and hard work. It was so nice to see you all. Our next family event will take place on June 14th. Please mark your calendars for this day. Our Kindergarten Graduation/Moving Up Celebration will take place during the morning of June 14th. More information will be sent home, but I wanted to make you aware of the date. Reading: This week we will continue to work through our Daily Five Literacy Stations. We will add two more heart words to our Word Wall. We are practicing reading and writing these words. We are also practicing making new words in the same word family. Now that we know the word all, we can read and write many other words in the same family: ball, call, fall, hall, mall, small...etc. This has been very exciting for us! You can practice doing this at home too. Writing: We have been doing a great job writing in our journals and responding to the many different dinosaur stories we have been reading. This week we will begin a short writing unit on poetry. I can't wait to see what our kindergarten writers create! :) Math: We are wrapping up our unit on addition and subtraction. This week we will revisit composing and decomposing numbers 11-20. We will use manipulatives along with our math pages to practice these tricky teen numbers. Science: We will soon begin a unit on water play. We will experiment with sinking and floating and many other activities with water. This will help us as we begin to explore a fun unit on oceans and ocean life! Thank you for your ongoing support. I am so very proud of how much the children have grown during these past few months. :) Sincerely, Mrs. Eileen Browne PS I am not sure why the format is not allowing me to make paragraphs. Please know that this is driving me crazy and I am trying to fix it! :)