First Lutheran Kindergarten Friday Letter
April 6, 2012
For your information…
School Skills and Spanish Summer Camp: Carolina, our Spanish teacher, and I will be teaching a one week half day camp this summer! We are so excited to offer this fun, beach-themed camp for 4-7 year olds to keep school skills and Spanish skills sharp the week of July 30th!
Thank you: Thank you for all of your support, donations and ticket sales for our VERY successful basket raffle! The kids are so excited to have a new climber for recess time! Also….drum roll please…we collected $79.50 in our coin jar for Mary’s Place! Thank you for your generosity and spare change!
Math Homework: Please see enclosed math activity for math homework this week! If your child returns their math, they can earn a free pencil this week!
Enrichment Classes: Please see enclosed forms for our last session of enrichment classes!
Easter Gift: Happy Easter! We hope your child enjoys the small Easter gift from us!
Book Order Due: April 18th My picks for this book order are:
SeeSaw:
56. Nature’s Miracles Pack: This is a great pack that will complement our curriculum when we study butterflies and work in our Kindergarden!
35. The Grouchy Ladybug: Eric Carle is our author study coming up and this book is all about telling time…our next math unit!
Firefly:
18. Elephant and Piggie Set: We have been reading these adorable books in our small guided reading groups! They are so much fun, the kids love to laugh and read them!
Reading Logs: Please return completed log May 1st for a small prize!
Inventors Table: We would love it if you could send in any clean recyclables for our Inventors Table that we will have as a station every Friday at Free Choice! Please no styrofoam. THANKS!
Gardening Supplies: We are excited to start our garden unit next week! If your child has any gardening tools that we could borrow to help prepare our Kindergarden for planting, please send in:
*Kid-sized gardening gloves
*Kid-sized gardening tools
*Seeds to plant in our garden!
Mother’s Day Tea: Please see enclosed invitation! Please RSVP how many guests your child will have attending the tea-don’t forget to include the guests’ first and last name.
Important upcoming dates:
April 17th: Kinder Coffee Chat-Spread the word for any families that are interested in attending Kindergarten at First Lutheran next year!
April 23-27th: Spring Break!
April 30: Class Pictures
May 6th: Singing performance at 11am church service
May 10th: Mother’s Day Tea at 11am
May 11th: Field Trip to Seattle Childrens Theatre 10:30am show-The Hungry Caterpillar
May 16th: Kindergarten Bake Sale
May 21st: All School Health Day
May 28th: No School-Memorial Day
June 4th: All School Field Day
June 12th: Celebrate Summer Birthdays at Saltwater Beach Park
June 13th: Last Day of School
July 30th-August 3rd: School Skills and Spanish Camp from 9am-12pm
Dear Kindergarten Families,
Literacy: This month we started our poetry study! There are many worthwhile reasons to teach poetry writing in Kindergarten. Some of the advantages are that it requires little writing to express ideas, it inspires a love of language, invites careful choice of words, provides an easy, open-ended alternative for kids who find structured forms of writing challenging, positively impacts other writing and most important of all: Kids love it! After writing a couple class poems about rain and Kindergarten, students then wrote their own poems. Some of the poems were about dogs, recess, rain, sun, friends, zoo animals and Legos! We are also sending home the latest little reader, The Bunny Book! Please have your child read this book to as many people as they can! We also learned some fun chants to remember how to spell some common sight words-“are”, “was”, “go”, “have”. Ask your child if they remember the chants!
Math: To welcome April, we filled in our April calendar! We played a few math games this week to deepen students’ understanding of concepts we have talked about before in class. We did a money game where children rolled dice and collected coins and had to exchange for nickels or dimes. We also played Ones, Tens, Hundreds where children rolled a dice and tried to make 10 bundles of 10. Look for this game in their Friday envelope. Lastly, we talked about different ways to divide numbers. For example, 5 and 5, 4 and 6 or 7 and 3 for dividing 10. To help children understand this addition concept, we put 10 beads on a pipe cleaner and students had to show us the different groups of 10 on their bead string.
Science: Thank you for a wonderful trip to the zoo! What a beautiful, fun day to enjoy our friends and see our zoo animals! Thank you to all of the parents who drove to the zoo to make this field trip possible! Children finished their zoo observation worksheets in class this week.
Music: Mr. Perez worked with us on our songs for our concert on May 6th!
Chapel: The Doves did a wonderful job telling us the Easter story!
Have a wonderful Easter weekend, Ms. Heidi and Ms. Hart