STUDIO K NEWS

🎨 September 4: Kaleidoscope Field Trip

We are excited for our Kaleidoscope Field Trip on Friday, September 4! Please make sure your child arrives at school on time so we can get everyone ready for our trip. A few important reminders:

• Please visit the provided link to double-check whether you signed your child up for a home lunch.

• Send backpacks as usual with your child’s folder, iPad, water bottle, snack, and lunch.

• We will board the bus around 9:00 a.m. and arrive at Kaleidoscope around 10:00 a.m.

• Please only join us if you were contacted as a field trip volunteer, as Kaleidoscope limits the number of adults who may attend.

After our time at Kaleidoscope, we will eat a snack and visit the Mo Willems exhibit before heading back to school for a relaxing afternoon together.

We can’t wait for a fun day of creating, exploring, and learning! 🎨🚌

Lunch Reminder 

🇺🇸 September 7: No School — Labor Day

There will be no school on Monday, September 7 in observance of Labor Day. Enjoy the long weekend with your family! ❤️🤍💙

💛 September 17, 6:00-7:15: Who Am I? Showcase + Parent Information Night

Your child probably comes home talking about their Studio K friends—and we want you to know who those friends are, too!

We invite you to join us for our Who Am I? Showcase, where you’ll have the opportunity to meet the children who make up your child’s classroom community, put faces with the names you hear at home, and learn a little about what makes each child special.

These kiddos will grow and learn together through fifth grade, so building connections between our children and families is an important part of creating our Studio K community.

🕐 What to Expect

Please arrive between 5:50–6:00 p.m.

We will begin by getting our Studio K friends set up and ready to share their Who Am I? Showcase with you. After the showcase, students will head with a staff member while parents stay for our Parent Information Night. We anticipate wrapping up around 7:15 p.m.

👧 A Note About Siblings

If possible, we ask that siblings stay home for this event. It can be difficult for parents to hear and participate fully during the parent meeting with additional children in the room. Please also know that siblings will not be able to join the students with our staff member during the parent meeting. That portion of the evening is for Studio K students only.

We are excited for an evening dedicated to knowing our kids, knowing one another, and strengthening the community they will grow up in together. 💛

⏰ Early Release + 🏫 School Family Day

Friday, September 18 will be an Early Release Day, with dismissal at 12:50 p.m.

It will also be our first School Family Day! On these special days, our entire school breaks into small “school families.” Each staff member has a group of students from kindergarten through fifth grade who will stay together as a school family. These days give students a chance to build relationships, make connections across grade levels, and strengthen our school community.

Just to clarify: When you hear your child talk about a “Family Day,” this means their school family—families from home do not come to school for these days. 😊

During September, we will explore sorting, counting, and comparing groups of objects. Students will learn to notice different attributes—such as color, shape, and size—and use given categories to sort objects into groups.

We will also build strong counting strategies as students practice counting groups of up to 20 objects and creating groups with a given number of objects.

As we compare groups, students will use math vocabulary such as greater, fewer, and equal to describe what they notice and explain their thinking.

🏠 Try It at Home!

• Sort it! Grab a handful of everyday objects—LEGO pieces, socks, buttons, toys, or snacks. Give your child a way to sort them, such as big/small, red/not red, or by shape. Then count how many are in each group.

• Count & Compare! Make two small groups of objects (up to 20). Have your child count each group and decide which group is greater, fewer, or whether the groups are equal. Try lining the objects up in pairs to help them compare!

We have learned that builders notice, wonder, learn, and share—and we have tools that help us do each of these things! We use our eyes to notice, our brains to wonder, reading to learn, and writing to share our thinking and learning with others.

We have been working on becoming writers by learning how to take the ideas in our brains and put them on paper using pictures and words. This month, we will focus on slowing down and creating detailed illustrations that help tell our stories and communicate our ideas.

We will also begin exploring how writers use words to share their thinking. As students try to write, they will naturally begin to notice the skills they still need—like knowing letters, sounds, and how to form letters. This gives us a meaningful reason to begin learning phonics: we need these tools to communicate what is in our brains!

Soon, we will begin building these same foundational skills as readers. The more we learn to read, the more we can discover answers to our wonderings, learn about our world, and continue growing as builders. 

Studio K has been learning that we are builders, and builders belong to a community. We started by exploring how our names help us belong to our classroom community. We also talked about the things people can see when they look at us—and all of the important things on the inside that others cannot see just by looking!

Throughout September, students will continue discovering and sharing who they are. We will explore our favorite things, what we are good at, how we help others, what we are still learning to do, and even set a goal for this school year.

Next, we will explore one of our first communities—our families. We will talk about the rules and traditions we have at home and discover that every family can look, sound, and do things differently.

Finally, we will bring all of this learning back to Studio K as a community. Together, we will think about how we want our school family to look, feel, and work together, as well as the special traditions we want to create as a class.

All of this learning will come together at our Who Am I? Showcase, where your child will get to share more about who they are, the communities they belong to, and what makes them them! 

We have met a new friend named Shubert, who has some BIG feelings! Shubert is helping us learn that we all experience different emotions and that we can learn tools to help us manage them.

We are focusing on four main feelings: happy, sad, mad, and scared. Students are learning to recognize these feelings in themselves and think about what they can do when those emotions start to feel really big.

We are spending extra time learning what to do when anger starts to take control. Students know that when their anger gets too big, their first job is to go to a safe spot and calm their body. This month, we will walk students through our five calming steps so they can begin using these tools more independently when big feelings take hold.

We have also been working hard on using our BIG voice! Students are practicing using their words to confidently tell others how they feel and what they need. Our goal is to give students the tools they need to handle big feelings, solve problems, and take care of themselves and others.