October 8-12

We kicked off our CREATE Kindness challenge on Thursday at our all school assembly!  We are collecting socks for Kid President's Socktober!   Please send in new pairs of socks you wish to donate by October 31!  Our school goal is to collect 500 pair as a school to donate to Homeless Connections of Appleton.

Upcoming Events: 
10/11:  PSC Family Event at Skate City
10/12: Scholastic Orders due
10/19:  Heckrodt and Fire Station Field Trip--Please send back form if you have not already done so!
10/25&10/26: NO SCHOOL

Reading: As the Kindergartners work toward more conventional reading, we will be working on learning "snap words", or words that appear frequently in books but are not easily sounded out. Our current snap words are I, is, and, the, & me. Another strategy for beginning readers is to look at the picture, think about what would make sense, and then read! If you have any pattern books at home, give your child the pattern on the first page and then watch as they use the pictures to read the rest! 

Writing: We will wrap up our very first writing unit and celebrate by having everyone edit a piece of writing, fancy it up by illustrating, and then reading it to the class. Students will bring home their writing work from the unit. If you are able, look through it with your child. They worked really hard! We begin a new writing unit on Wednesday and I believe it will be extremely exciting for the kiddos! The  unit is called Show and Tell. Look for a note and Ziploc bag to come home early in the week so that students can bring ONE thing in to show, tell, and write about! 

 Math:  We will work on number order this week, especially how to find missing numbers in a series.  We will also review the shapes and work on seeing numbers in various ways.  We will work with a new game called Tiny Polka Dots.  The cards for the game show numbers in a variety of ways and we will work together to sequence numbers in a variety of ways.  This would be a great game to purchase for home as there are SO many things you can do with the cards to promote math thinking.

Social Studies: The students love interviewing our school helpers! It is great to visit the different offices in the school to learn about what our school helpers do.  After introducing the new social studies centers, students will have a chance to work in each center this week. Students will create building block structures of where our school community helpers work. We will create webs that describe the work of the school community helpers. Finally, students will look at an assortment of pictures, determine the problem, and decide which community helper(s) could be called to fix the problem!