We’ve taken a much deserved week to slow down and just enjoy playing in our classrooms and getting caught up on some bits and pieces around the classroom.

We’re just about finished our Alphabet Books.  Some of the children had missed pages due to sickness or travel so they did their best this week to get caught up on at least the printing and receiving their Alphabet stickers!

We read the delightful 10 Black Dots by Donald Crews and completed the sentence frame “___ dots can make a ___” for individual pages to contribute to a class big book.  The children were asking what happens to all the big books we make every year?  Well, we take all the books apart every June, sort out the pages by student and create an individual big book for every child with just his or her own pages. It’s another keepsake from Kindergarten that your child can read over the summer.

Speaking of reading, WOW!  Did we ever have a lot of fun and excitement this week with our Home Reading Book Exchange!  The children diligently read their books each evening and today we had a flood of books returned and ready to be exchanged.  This is such a fun part of Kindergarten for us when the children are eager to read these little books independently.  Remember to return this weekend’s books on Monday for the next set.  

We are going to be asking the children to select the books themselves so not to worry if the books on occasion are a bit too easy (excellent to develop oral reading fluency) or a bit too hard (excellent for you to read and teach some new vocabulary and sight words).  We all encounter reading materials of this nature.  But it’s the strategies of using the picture clues, looking for smaller words in big words and context which helps us with our comprehension.

We also wanted to thank one of our Ridgeview families for donating this great stack of home readers to the Kindergarten.  We’ll be adding these to the Home Reading baskets so gives our children even more choices when choosing their own books!

Using our Bonus Bank earnings from the Scholastic Book orders this year, we purchased this set of Melissa and Doug Fairy Tale Castle blocks.  It’s gorgeous and sparking lots of fairy tale vocabulary – the children love the wishing well, the horse and carriage and the archers and creating fun scenes with pieces and acting them out.

As everyone knows from the Reminds, we had a rockin’ day on Friday.

We finished our tennis lessons this week.  The children learned to use a tennis racquet, toss and catch the ball across the net and stay in their court.

We had our class photos taken and were lucky to escape any rain during our panorama photo with the entire school.  

We had some additional schedule changes so Mrs. Daudlin’s class will have their Library Book Exchange on Monday as we were unable to fit it into Friday.  We also moved Forest Friday to Monday as we ran out of steam for an outdoor playtime.

Reminders and Upcoming Events

Library Book Exchange is back to our regular day now, Wednesday.

Forest Fridays continue with the good weather so please keep your rain boots at school.

Keep the Tombola loot bags coming in!  Our goal is to collect one from each student as the prizes from this fun Mayfair event!