Pages
- 40 DOLCH SIGHT WORDS FOR FLASH CARDS
- COIN RECOGNITION
- COLOR OF THE DAY IN KINDERGARTEN AUGUST 2010
- FAVORITE KINDERGARTEN WEBSITES
- FIND OUT IF YOU KNOW ALL 40 SIGHT WORDS!
- LEARN SIGHT WORDS - FIRST RED RAINBOW WORDS
- LEARN SIGHT WORDS - THIRD GREEN RAINBOW WORDS
- LEARN SIGHT WORDS- SECOND YELLOW RAINBOW WORDS
- LEARN SIGHT WORDS: LAST PURPLE RAINBOW WORDS
- LEARN SIGHT WORDS: NUMBER WORDS
- LEARN SIGHT WORDS: COLOR WORDS
- Letter Names and Sound Association Practice
- NATIONAL SYMBOLS
- SETTING SAIL WITH THE SEVEN HABITS
- STUDENT BUS PASS
- WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE WE?
News & Information
SMITH'S SCOOP OCTOBER 31, 2009
We have had a very busy week with Red Ribbon week activites, scarecrow building, and our fun celebration of fall! Thank you to all the parents who helped make all of this possible! I can't believe the end of October is here and Thanksgiving is right around the corner! We will begin our Thanksgiving unit next week. The boys and girls will learn about the first Thanksgiving and also about how and why we celebrate Thanksgiving today. We will discuss similarites and differences in the "past" and "present". We will learn a lot about how the Pilgrims and Native Americans lived. We will be making Pilgrim and Native American gear to wear at our class feast! This is such a fun time of the year!
Don't forget to turn your clocks back one hour on Saturday night - yeah an extra hour of sleep!!!!
Next week's curriculum focus:
Language Arts: Great Habits, Great Readers (GHGR)- Thinking about word meaning to predict and understand stories; using picture clues and letter/sound associations to decode unknown words; retelling story events in order; identify and produce rhyming words (evaluated this nine weeks)
Book: The Best Places (nonfiction)
Skills: identify rhyming pictures –at and -et; blend sounds to read rhyming words –at and –et words; concepts of print; retelling a story; word meaning
Phonics Focus: Tt letter/sound association
Sight Words: for, its, five
Handwriting: Jj
Writer’s Workshop: identification of a letter/word/sentence; listening for sounds to write in words; spacing; capitalizing first words; authoring a class number book
Math: ordinals to 10th; numeration to 20; building numbers to 20 using “ten frames” and counting cubes; more, fewer/less, equal to; identification of a penny, nickel and dime and their values; fair trading ten pennies for a dime; days of the week; months of the year; four seasons; counting to 30; shapes – sphere and cube. ***Practice having your child build a specific number using objects by giving oral directions such as “build a number that is 2 less than 10” or “build a number that is 3 more than 6”
Social Studies: Veteran’s Day (evaluated during 2nd nine weeks) please send in your “plaques” for the Pickett’s Mill wall of honor; begin Thanksgiving unit
Health: five senses
Upcoming Dates:
Monday, November 2nd- Boosterthon kick-off and movie night
Tuesday, November 3rd – Student Holiday/Area professional learning day
Thursday, November 5th- picture retakes (you must return the original packet that day to have a retake) If your child was absent he/she may have their picture taken but a packet must be filled out and paid for so let me know if you need an order form.
Friday, November 6th-visit the media center for book check out
Wednesday, November 11th- Veteran's Day; Boosterthon event
THANK YOU!!!!
A huge “THANK YOU!” to all the parents who helped with our fall centers and with our class scarecrow. I know this was quite an undertaking and your support and leadership was and is greatly appreciated!!! Make sure you come by the school and look at all of our Pickett's Mill recycled scarecrows!!
PICTURE DAY- WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30TH
SPECIAL MEETING FOR ALL KINDERGARTEN PARENTS
Kindergarten Parent Meeting
We have now completed the new (revised) kindergarten screening with all of our students. We would like to discuss the results of the screenings with all of our kindergarten parents. Please plan to meet with kindergarten teachers and Pickett’s Mill administrators on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009 at 6:00 P. M. in rooms 214 & 216. This meeting will be followed by PTA meeting at 6:30 and Open House with your child’s teacher at 7:00. See you then!
SMITH'S SCOOP
August 13, 2009
We have had a great week! I am enjoying your sweet children. They are really working hard at school. There is so much to learn about during the first week of school and it is such a big transition for many children. I think they are beginning to adjust to our routine. We are really working to stretch those attention spans and listen carefully during instruction. Today I explained our behavior system to the children and told them we would practice using it for a few days before reporting home. The boys and girls will be on a color system with rewards and consequences determined by their behavior. The system is based on six colors. If the behavior card remains on green all day the child earns a sticker for his/her treasure chest. Every time five stickers are earned a small prize is rewarded and twenty stickers equals a big prize. Each day the child's behavior card begins on green signifying a great day. If a child is making poor choices the card must be turned to yellow- meaning "caution" or "slow down and make good choices". If the child continues to break the rules the card is turned to blue for five minutes of time out. If the card must be turned again it goes to orange for ten minutes time out. The fourth time the card is turned to red and this means fifteen minutes removed from the group and a contact with the parents is made. If the child returns to the group and continues to misbehave then the card is turned to black and this means a visit to the office and a talk with an administrator. Your child's conduct color will come home each day on a small calendar stapled inside of their take home folder. This will begin toward the end of next week. Please keep in mind they are receiving consequences at school when the problem occurs and usually just need to be reminded of your expectations when they are having difficulty. If problems with behavior are continual and persistent then we will discuss other strategies to incorporate at school and at home.
Please turn in the following paperwork if you haven't already:
Cobb Co. policy signature sheet
emergency clinic cards
class t-shirt orders and money
Chicken biscuits from Chick-fil-A will be sold each Friday morning beginning August 21st for $2.50. Proceeds will benefit the Relay for Life (American Cancer Society)
PTA Communication Folders will be sent home each Tuesday. Please empty it and return it on Wednesday and we will hold on to it until the following Tuesday.
Next week we will begin our Zoo Phonics program. The first five letters of the alphabet will be introduced and the children will learn the letter name, sound, and motion associated with the following animals: Allie Alligator, Bubba Bear, Catina Cat, Dee Dee Deer, and Ellie Elephant. We will be learning a fun song called Meet Us at the Zoo. This program will also be interrelated with our science standards on animals.
We will continue our unit on colors by completing our Brown Bear, Brown Bear booklets and focusing on the following colors and color words: green, brown, orange, pink, white, black and gray. Please make flash cards for all of the color words that have been introduced and practice for instant recognition. You may want to have your child practice reading the following powerpoint version of Brown Bear. Download Brownbear
Along with shared reading we have been learning about the following book terms and concepts of print and we will continue to work on these: author, illustrator title, front cover, back cover, tracking words with our reading finger-top to bottom and left to right.
The boys and girls will continue to practice writing their names beginning with a capital letter followed by lowercase letters. Please reinforce and encourage this at home.
We will continue to cover the following skills during calendar math: names of the months and days of the week, ABAB patterns, counting, identifying the penny and its value, reciting birthdays.
We will begin Writer's Workshop next week. This will include journaling, responding to Our Morning News and to the book If You Take a Mouse to School by Laura Numeroff.
We will also sequence the story events after reading this story. Sequencing is an important comprehension skill. It can be practiced at home. Just challenge your child to retell stories in sequential order after listening to them.
In math we will be covering these positional words: above, below, under, between, beside, left, right. We will also practice identifying and extending patterns.
As you can see, we are busy every minute in order to get everything in that we are expected to learn in kindergarten!
Have a fantastic weekend!
Blenda Smith and Lynn Dillon
Smith's Scoop - First Edition 2009-2010
It was so great to meet everyone and especially all of my new little pirates at Sneak-a-Peek! I am excited to have so many parents who are eager to volunteer and participate. Thank you! I hope you feel informed and your new kindergartner feels confident and excited about coming to school! Thank you for visiting our class blog. It will be updated weekly and it will inform you of the exciting things we will be doing each week. I will let you know the performance standards we will be working on and you will be able to reinforce these at home. I will also keep you up to date on important events and homework assignments, as well as, posting pictures of fun things we're doing in class.
Next week will be a fun week as we ease into our new routine and become familiar with our new surroundings.
I will be sharing two special books that your child may already be familiar with, The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn and Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Bill Martin, Jr. We will be involved in many learning based activities pertaining to these stories. We will go on a search for Chester the raccoon, the main character in The Kissing Hand, as we discover many new places and faces around our school building. Don't forget to ask your child about the outcome of our search! Our many book activities will include: sequencing, sorting, color recognition, identification of color words and sight words, learning about nocturnal animals, similarities and differences in animals, plus many more! We will also be doing quite a bit of individual and group evaluating in order to drive instruction and determine small group placement for guided reading.
This week we will also be making, reviewing and practicing class/school rules. We will read and discuss a story about misbehaving monsters who come to school. We will learn that rules help to keep us safe. I will begin explaining our classroom behavior system which includes consequences and rewards. However, we will not put this system in place formally until the children have a chance to "practice" it. I will be sharing this information (and much more!) with you at Open House on Tuesday, Sept. 1st, at 7 p.m.
Please continue to send in any school supplies and don't forget a rest mat. We will be resting most afternoons through November. The mats need to be the plastic type so we can spray and wipe them down frequently. Also, you may want to keep a change of clothes in your child's backpack for those unexpected spills and accidents. It may save you a trip to the school.
Your child will be going to "SPECIALS" classes each day. This includes P.E., music, technology/computer, and art. Each month I will post the specials rotation so you will be aware of where your child is going each day. This is especially important for P.E. because your child needs to wear the proper shoes to participate. The August rotation calendar was in your Sneak-a-Peek folder and you may also download it from the following link: Download Specials rotation aug 09
One of the best things about school is getting to check out a book from the library/media center! Our class will be having a media center orientation the week of August 17th and will be able to check out a book soon thereafter. We are also excited about our upcoming Book Fair to be held in the media center the week of August 31st! Look for more information coming home about this.
A few reminders:
Please know how much we appreciate your encouragement and support! Our goal is to help your child learn and grow as much as possible. We are looking forward to a great year!
Blenda Smith and Lynn Dillon
