March 6, 2009

March 6, 2009

Dear Families,

We learned about the letter Qq. We talked about quiet animals. Sara Stoakes, the North Tama Homecoming queen and Kelsey Upah, the Tama County Fair queen were guest speakers in the classroom. The boys and girls listened to directions and filled out a listening quilt doing something different in each section of the quilt. These will be sent home so that families can see how well their kindergartner listened. In math we started counting by fives and working with nickels. Counting by fives is a very difficult skill for some kindergartners so extra practice at home would be really helpful. Centers included playing hangman, the card game War, reading books, working with pattern blocks, working in journals, counting beans on quiet mats, and the Pizza Palace in the dramatic playhouse.

Can you believe that we have finished learning about all 26 letters? Next week we will start working with long vowels found at the end of words like we, he, see, so, go, etc.

The Fine Arts Festival is a wonderful event that features special projects produced by students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The Fine Arts Festival will be held on Thursday, March 19th from 6:30 - 9:00. The Fine Arts Festival is held in the multi-purpose room, the lunchroom, and the gym. There’s more information about the Fine Art’s Festival in the Elementary Newsletter that was sent home earlier.

Soon this 3rd nine weeks will be over. We have been working hard on evaluating the students for their report cards. Some of the skills that you can practice at home are counting to 75, identifying numbers through 25, counting items to a specific number up to 25 correctly, identifying left and right, the days of the week, the months of the year, addresses and phone numbers, recognizing the letters learned so far, recognizing rhyming words, identifying pennies, nickels, and dimes and their values, counting to 100 by tens and fives, and associating the sounds to the consonants learned so far.

The Iowa winter weather is so unpredictable! Boots are still a good idea because our kindergartners are known to find the mud. Their shoes and our room’s floor stay cleaner when the kindergartners wear their boots. If we find that boots are not needed, they will stay on the red rug in the classroom.

Grandparents’ Day has now been officially set. Grandparents or other guests may come either Thursday, May 14th or Friday, May 15th. A short program will start at 2:00 followed by some kindergarten made refreshments. More information will be coming home closer to the event in May.

Have a great weekend!

Ms. Howard, Mrs. Owens, Mrs. Pokorny, Mr. Degner, and Mrs. Herink