Friday, January 13th

Hello Weckie Families!

Happy Friday and long weekend! We have been super busy in Kindergarten - and having so much fun!! It has been great to add Miss Lempert to our classroom and always nice to have a second teacher around too.  We have been working hard since we came back from Winter Break! If you happen to be in our hallway, come check out our New Years' Resolutions on the bulletin board. Lots of great ideas for us to try in 2017.

Thank you to everyone who sent in money for our first Pasta for Patients collection today. Remember you can do it online at this address: http://tinyurl.com/WeckiePennies  . We will be collecting again next Friday. Thank you so much for your support... it would be pretty cool to raise the most money of any class!


Reader's Workshop:
In Reader's Workshop we have been working on oral retellings of some of our favorite books! Being able to orally retell a story is a wonderful reading comprehension strategy for our young readers. Last week we spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the story of "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly". We learned the song and then created our own "Old Lady" as a visual to help us to retell the events of the story in order. We also read some variations on the original, such as "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow", "Who Swallowed A Bell", "Who Swallowed a Pie" and so on. We had great fun learning to retell this story that we did another story this past week. This week we used Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle's "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" to retell the events of the story. Miss Lempert did a lot of work with the kids reading and retelling the story. Then each child created their own visual for this story where their coloring of each animal had to match the story. Then we got to retell the story without the book using our Brown Bear visual! Look for these to come home. Be sure to have your child use both the old lady and the bear to retell these beloved stories to you and your family.

Meanwhile Reading Groups are firing up and off to a great start!! Each child has received a colored canvas type bag with their name on the front. Each day that they work with me in their group, they will bring the bag home with them. Typically they will have ONE new book and ONE familiar book (old book). This way they have one that should be a familiar read for fluency and confidence, and one new book for them to learn to decode and use reading strategies to learn to read it. These books are leveled and have been selected to meet the strengths and needs of your child. We have 6 groups that I will continue to rotate and see to the best of my ability! Every group should hopefully meet 2-3 times a week depending on their needs. Please make sure to spend ample time at home with the books that come home. Read them a few times, have your child point out different words, help them to break apart new words by sounds or use the illustration to help them. You can ask them to retell their story too - what happened first, then, next, last, etc! When returning the book(s) be sure to sign the Reading Form and keep this in their canvas book bag. So far we are doing an awesome job taking books home and returning them on time - way to go!

*Our new sight word this week was: be

Writer's Workshop
We continue to work on our Writing Wizard unit with the kids. It has been fun to watch their development in writing sounds, words and even sentences over the course of this unit! Soon we will be wrapping up this unit and moving onto a new unit!

One of our latest Writing Wizard's with his completed work.

We have also been toying with the idea of Writing Folders and what they will look like this year in Kindergarten. We will probably begin to send these folders home in the next few weeks. There are directions inside the folder about how to use these "journals" at home to encourage your child to keep writing. This will also give you a chance to see what your child can do and what you can help them work on at home to strengthen their skills. Each week we will ask that they do a minimal of two writing entries, complete with a colored illustration. The writing is to be done in pencil, illustrations in crayons or colored pencils are great. You'll be side-by-side with your child to help them to phonetically spell each word (how it sounds, regardless if a word is spelled correctly) unless it is a sight word, which they should be able to do on their own! More info to come soon :-).

Math Workshop

Collecting our favorite color data for our graph!

We have been super busy in Math lately! We have done several math station rotations to practice learning new math games including: Roll and Record, Monster Squeeze, Number Top It, Spin and Move and more! This past week it has been all: shapes, shapes and more shapes!! Your child should be familiar with these 2-D shapes and names: circle, square, triangle, rectangle, trapezoid and hexagon. Please review these shapes at home with your child - they are everywhere when you stop and look! We have spent time talking about attributes of shapes (their characteristics that make them the same and different). We have been using the Connect Ed Software to incorporate technology into our exploration of these shapes. We sorted the attribute blocks whole group and small group. We talked about how we all have different attributes too (kids with jeans on vs. kids with buttons on). Kids got to pick attribute blocks out of a Mystery Bag, solely based on the attributes they could feel! This was a super fun challenge! We ended our week with a graphing activity where we determined that blue is the most popular favorite color in our class and yellow is the least popular!

Sorting out the attribute blocks on the Interactive White Board.

We had fun incorporating the technology of Connect Ed!

Unit 4 HomeLinks will be coming home with your child today and are filled with awesome reinforcements of all we have been doing in school. Most of the activities are pretty quick and very well liked! 


Social Studies
In Social Studies this week we have been talking about Diversity and tying it in with learning about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the holiday on Monday. We have read a few great books about Dr. King and have also spent time with Todd Parr's book "It's Okay to be Different". Each child created their own page to go in a class made book about what they think about diversity - like it's okay to have blue eyes or it's okay to like the color pink. It's been pretty neat to hear what the kids think about diversity and why people should be treated equally and fairly all the time. I think many were pretty stunned to learn that people were once treated differently because of their skin color. While we keep the convo pretty light, each child was receptive and engaged. They were curious and also glad to hear that the laws had changed.

PBIS Teams
The first Thursday of each month we meet with our K-2 Multi-Age Teams. A few of our kids stay and are a part of Weckstein's Warriors, while the majority travel to a different K-2 teacher and school wide, K-5, we are doing the same lessons about positive behavior plan for Dublin. We focus on the shamrock characteristics: be responsible, be respectful, be resilient and have good integrity. This month January we are focusing on having good integrity. Your's truly was responsible for planning the building wide lesson and I put our kids to work! The vast majority (not all) have drawn a picture of when they have shown good integrity and we created a video and large bulletin board display in our hallway! Our kid's had some awesome ideas of ways that they have had good integrity. I'm proud to spend my time with such a great group of kids :-).

Important Upcoming Dates:
-January 16- NO SCHOOL in Observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

• January 20 Pennies for Patients Spare Change Collection #2 
• January 20 PTA Family Bingo Night (6:30-8:30 PM) Cafeteria - Please come, the Weckstein's are hoping to be there!! :-)