Week of January 23rd Bauer Drive Kindergarten

We had a great week last week! We are glad to see that Andrew is recovering well from his surgery.  Everyone in the class has been taking turns to be his helper! Miss Kimmie is really proud of all of us.  This week, we are excited to welcome our new friend Rebecca!  Rebecca will be starting our class on Monday. We are all excited to get to know her.
We have a busy week planned, starting with Chinese New Year on Monday.  We will use our online site Bookflix, to read a story about the Chinese New Year and learn all about it.  We will learn the tradition of “cleaning out bad luck.”  To get ready for Chinese New Year, everyone joins in housecleaning.  This is symbolic for sweeping out the old and welcoming the new.  We will do a similar activity in class.  Everyone will work together to clean and organize our centers!  Also, in the old days, people believed that explosions scared away the bad spirits and bad luck.  Noise is still an important part of Chinese New Year Festivites.  We will gather some noisemakers and instruments and participate in a 60 second celebration of noise to chase the old year away.  Get ready to hold your ears!  Next, we will learn about the dragon dance, make our own dragon fliers and dance around the classroom with them.  We will take a little break and use chop sticks to enjoy lo mein for snack!  We will also participate in a symmetry activity and a Chinese game called Tsoo Tsoo.
In Math this week, we will continue to work on patterning, counting and money. In our curriculum, we will do activities to help us understand that fingers and toes represent a set of objects up to 20.  We will order numbers from 0-10, learn to add 1, understand the meaning of same, more, less and understand how many more.
In Reading Street, we will learn our new sight words girl, boy, which and cat.  Our main reading selection is calledFarfallina and Marcel. In this story of friendship, we will meet 2 animals that go through some changes.  We will use this story to discuss our question of the week “What happens when animals change?”  We will also learn our amazing words goose, caterpillar, reflection, gosling, butterfly and cocoon. We will read many books including In the Kit!, Dad and Fif, Can Melvin Scoot? Animals Change, Red Fans and They will Grow. Every day we work hard on segmenting words and blending words.   Many of us are reading very well on our own.  Keep logging into pearsonsuccessnet.com and practice at home!
We will focus on the letter F this week in the initial and final position.  We will also be reviewing all of the letters previously learned.  Our academic vocabulary is  retell, plot, characters, caption, fable, verbs for the future and verb with s. In Grammar,  we will review verbs and  verbs for the past tense.  This week we will focus on verbs that add an s and using verbs to show actions that will happen.
Finally, we will continue to travel back in time and learn more about dinosaurs. This week, our focus will be Triceratops, Tyrannasaurus Rex, Iguanodon and Apatosaurus.  We will continue to read, look at pictures of them, measure their massive size and compare them.  We love using our smartboard to go on dinosaur digs and recover fossils.  Check out our favorite websites!http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/scienceforkids/dinosaurs/archaeopteryx.htm and www.tvokids.com/games/dinodig.  Have a great week everyone!
Thank you for your support with the bookfair.  Our school has earned so many free books because of your help!