January News

Dates to Remember

School-to-Home Connection

Your child will receive a formal assessment on their reading level and their sight word knowledge this month. The goal for kindergarten students is to be on level D by the end of the school year. Please review the sight word kindergarten list A with your child. In addition to sight words, your child may need review of their letter sounds and reading numbers to 50.

Below is a list of vowels and some ways to help your child remember the vowels. Ask your child to demonstrate the motion associated with each sound.

/a/ says aah! -The sound made when you are scared.

/e/ says eh? -The sound made when you cannot hear.

/i/ says ih! -The sound you make when you do not like the taste of something.

/o/ says ah- The sound the doctor asks you to make so he/she can check your throat.

/u/ says uh- The sound you make when you realize you made a silly mistake.

Other Ways to Support Your Child's Learning

Talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and why we celebrate his life in January.

Set up a ramp in your house and experiment with rolling items down a ramp. What do you notice?

Classroom Update

Math

We are working on the “terrific” teens this month. We define the terrific teens as ten and some more. For example, 13 is equal to a group of ten and three more. These numbers are tricky because you have to read it from right to left instead of left to right like the rest of the numbers in our number system. For example, for the numbers 23, 24, 25, etc., we read the the number in the tens place and then the ones place, unlike teen numbers.

Language Arts

We are working on letter sounds and have come up with some ways to help students remember the vowel sounds.

Social Studies and Science

In our unit, All About Our School and Community, students are learning about different jobs in the community. We focus on peacemakers and honorable people in our communities.  We learned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and about how we can work to make his dream for our country come true.  We learned that we are the same on the inside, and that it is the love and kindness inside a person that matters, not the color of our skin.  

During the winter, kindergarten students will study the "Moving and Grooving" unit in science. Students will explore the effects of different strengths and different directions of pushes and pulls on the motion of an object. As an engineering task, students will design a device to knock down dominoes. They will also conduct a "construction" experiment changing the strength and direction of a "wrecking ball" so they can knock down a wall without knocking down nearby houses.