Newsletter: Week 2

Room 4 News
Friday, September 4, 2009
Miss Wagenaar

Reminders/Notices:
•Beginning this week, we will be having P.E. on Wednesdays with Miss Casellini’s class. Please send your child to school with tennis shoes or sneakers, appropriate for physical activity. Thank you!
•We are also looking for Morning Greeters for our Kindergarten Gate, this would require you to be at the Kinder Gate from 7:55-8:15 helping to facilitate drop off. If you are interested please let me know and I can talk to you more about specific scheduling.
•Reminder, there is no school on Monday due to the Labor Day holiday. Enjoy your day!
•Next week begins Color Week, the order is as follows Tuesday-Red, Wednesday-Orange, Thursday-Yellow, and Friday-Green.
•I am still working on completing a volunteer schedule. I will send out a tentative schedule later this weekend, however we will not be inviting volunteers to join us in the classroom for a couple of weeks (until we have a little more practice with our routines and procedures-we’ll play it by ear)

This Week:
We also spent this week focusing on our routines and procedures. We read the book “No, No Bono” and reviewed classroom rules, using a misbehaving monkey as a model. We learned how to say hello in Japanese (konnichi wa), Hindi (Namaste), Hawaiian (aloha), Korean (ahn nyeong) and Pirate (ahoy). We read several versions of the gingerbread man story this week, including but not limited to: The Gingerbread Cowboy by Janet Squires, Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett, The Gingerbread Man by Karen Schmidt, The Gingerbread Man by Jim Aylesworth, The Gingerbread Boy by Paul Galdone, The Gingerbread Girl by Lisa Campbell Ernst. We made Gingerbread dough, rolled, cut, and baked the cookies. We went on a Gingerbread Hunt with stops at the office, staff room, computer lab, and library. Then we decorated and ate our Gingerbread people. We focused on the letter Mm, writing it, practicing the sound that it makes, and finding it in our own Mm book.

Next Week:
We will be adding more routines into our day. We will be learning routines for our Readers Workshop. We are going to be celebrating Color Week – using literacy activities to reinforce color words. We will be focusing on Rules and citizenship in Social Studies and will start sorting in Math.

Questions to ask your child:
1.Ask your child what animal ate the Gingerbread Boy in our stories. (fox)
2.Have your child show you what their mouth looks like when they make the sound of the letter m. (their lips should be closed.)
3.Ask your child what their favorite thing to do is during Choice Time.