Friday, May 4, 2018

May 4, 2018 Newsletter

Dear Parents,

We have had a very busy week here in Room 115!  The students have been working hard and learning lots!  We have been learning a lot about nature.  So far we have learned about trees, flowers, and seeds.  We also just started a unit on insects and life cycles.  We are excited to be able to observe the life cycle of a butterfly right in our own classroom!  The Burlington Science Center has given us several caterpillars that have been busy eating and growing.  We also have a luna moth cocoon that we are anxiously keeping an eye on!  The students are learning about all the different body parts of insects and are even learning how to label their drawings.  You’ll have to ask them to sing the “Head, Thorax, Abdomen” Song that they just learned today!

The students have been working hard in their Busy Spider books.  They will finish these next week and will bring them home to share with their families.  They are great books to re-read over and over again!

We have been doing butterfly symmetry at the art table.  The students also made giant flowers based on Eric Carle’s book called “The Tiny Seed.”  They labeled the parts and measured how tall their flowers were with non-standard units such as markers, cubes, and color tiles.  They also did a writing project where they wrote five sentences describing each part of their flowers.

We have been working with shapes in math.  We even went on a shape hunt inside and outside of the school and talked about the shapes that are all around us.  We just finished our unit on the position and location of objects.  The concepts have been more of a review for the students so we have been trying to come up with some fun and creative ways to practice them.  We made a pretend minivan yesterday and used position words to describe where everyone was sitting.  Then we “traveled” to the beach, Mrs. Sullivan’s house, and to the ice cream store!  It was fun to see the students using their imaginations while also using great math vocabulary!  We also made ladybug books that described the position and location of a ladybug.  These went home today.

We will be starting our last two Kindergarten math topics during the next few weeks and will be doing some Step Up to First Grade Math Lessons after that along with some other fun math activities.  Please continue helping your child practice his/her subtraction facts.  I will be getting ready to assess them soon.  The more they practice…the better they will get!  We worked on a fun project today where students got to make pictures using different shapes.  We will put their work together in a class book and start circulating it soon. 

We also managed to squeeze in a little time to paint this week.  The students painted forsythia branches that have certainly brightened our classroom and made it feel more like spring!

Information went home yesterday about our next field trip.  We will be going to Boston to ride on the Swan Boats.  The cost of the field trip is $7 for students and $3.50 for chaperones.  Checks can be made payable to Francis Wyman Kindergarten.  Please let me know if you are interested in chaperoning.

The students enjoyed visiting the Scholastic Book Fair this week.  It’s not too late to order books online.  The link is below.  The online fair will be available until next Friday.

Spring 2018 Online Book Fair QR Code

We also sent home the regular Scholastic Book Club order form.  It is full of great books for summer reading!  If you are interested in ordering, the due date is this Tuesday, May 8th.

Have a great weekend!

Melanie Duncan

PS… The Burlington Science Center is in need of newspapers.  If you have some that you don’t need, please consider sending them in to the classroom.  We will send them over to the Science Center from here.  Thank you!












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