Friday, September 23, 2016

Wow! Can you believe we just finished Week 3 of Kindergarten?

We have been having the BEST time EVER in Kindergarten this year!! I am loving getting to know each child's unique personality, watching new friendships form, leaders emerge, shy students coming out of shells and spending my days with your kids. This is a high-energy, high-curiosity group of Weckies and they are AWESOME!!

Thank you to everyone who came to Curriculum Night. We were excited by the great turn out and hope you enjoyed learning all about what we will be teaching your child this year at Dublin! Notes from Curriculum Night have been sent out electronically (like the classroom sign up) and in paper form, the little Remind 101 card as well as our Classroom Routines (on day 1). Thank you to everyone who has signed up for Remind 101. If you have not done so yet, you can simply send a text to 81010 and text the message @weckie and you'll be all set! We do use this handy service frequently in Kindergarten so you will want to make sure you are signed up to get reminders and news from our classroom.

Reader's Workshop
We have excitedly launched our Reader's Workshop over the course of the past two weeks. We began by talking about stamina, how long we can do something and have built our classroom stamina for independent reading from 3 minutes all the way to 8 minutes today. This includes reading text, finding letters we know in our books, examining the pictures, etc. We have learned how to be "Respectful Readers" and how to "Get Ready to Read"! We have spent time reading books about reading like: Read All About It, A Bear Ate It!, Wild About Books, The Best Place to Read and more to come! We are eager to be readers! The kids were excited to get their first sight word book as we focused on the word: see. Each week in Workshop we will focus on a new word, teaching many basic sight words. We read a book about the sight word, write a poem and do several hands on activities throughout the week to re-emphasize the sounds and spelling of the word. We will probably keep our familiar books from home at school a couple more weeks.

Writer's Workshop
We have also launched our Writer's Workshop this week! Daily we work on letter formation on white boards with dry erase markers after lunch. Now we are working on our launch unit with the motto: Think, Draw, Write! The kids are thinking about a story they want to tell on paper (typically a true story), drawing a picture and then if able, writing a letter or a few words about the picture. Over the course of the unit we will talk about Writing Stamina, talk about different kinds of writing paper and tools, talk about Writer Respect and how to stretch out our stories across more pages! This group of kids is very excited about telling their stories - it's wonderful in our room during Writer's Workshop!

Math Workshop
We have launched our Math Workshop this week with lots of COUNTING activities, books, games, songs, raps and more!! We have been reading books about counting, practiced counting objects, built puzzles that involve counting numbers and more. The first unit took us on a Number Walk through Dublin where we recorded the numbers we found all around Dublin - it was great! We even made it all the way up to fifth grade to find numbers and visited our secretaries in the office for more numbers. Next week a Math Homelink packet will come home. I know there is GREAT debate about homework in schools and what the research says and I'll be honest, I'm very torn! This being said, when HomeLinks come home please know that they are optional. They will reinforce the lessons we have done in school and can make for some fun family games at home. You can send them back with descriptions of what you did in each activity and I'm glad to read through, make comments and compliments, etc. but they are not mandatory or required to be completed.

Important Date:


It's PICTURE DAY on Monday and we have the very first time slot!! Our picture time is 9:15am. If you plan to order, please complete your order form and make sure to send it with your child first thing on Monday morning. Thank you so much :-).

More fun in 204...

Friday, September 9, 2016

Hello Weckie Families!!

 What a most AWESOME first week of Kindergarten we have been having! Sticking to our teamwork theme of Dublin, Team 204, is just the best! We have been learning so much this week and spending a lot of time getting to know each other. Loads of new friendships have been forming and it their smiles are contagious.

 The first week of Kindergarten brings out many emotions and one of those is: EXHAUSTION!! I have been asked all day long: when are we going home? And I have been told: I'm tired. I have probably heard those statements two dozen times a day.. and this is NORMAL and this is GOOD!! We expect this to be a huge shift for many, away from their nap time, and into a classroom for the day! Please know that as the days and weeks go on, it gets easier and suddenly it's more like: WOW, that was a fast day! or Are you sure it's time to go already? We'll get there... it just takes time!

Thank you to everyone for your generosity in donating so many fabulous school supplies. Our stash has been restocked above and beyond what I have ever had in past years... you are AMAZING!! We use it all and need it all!




Typically our Friday Newsletter will have info about: Reader's Workshop, Writer's Workshop, Language Workshop, Math Workshop, Science and Social Studies. Right now we have been doing a bunch of get to know you activities, stories about going to school and our emotions, learning about teamwork and learning about sharing. Kindergarten is such a fun place! Workshops will begin in the next few weeks and I'll be telling you all about them as we launch!


A couple of important reminders:
1. Birthday Books - as soon as they are done, please send them in! I see many still in green folders and want to make sure everyone has one when their birthday's come around.
2. Favorite Books - please make sure to send in your child's bag of 5 favorite books so we can use them next week to launch our Reader's Workshop. Thank you to everyone who has done so already! You ROCK!

Tonight is the PTA sponsored Pizza Picnic out on the playground. While it's too late to order pizza, feel free to pack a picnic dinner and come join us on the playground! I would love to see you all there from 5-7pm.

Last but not least, our Kindergarten Curriculum Night is on Wednesday, September 14th beginning at 6:30pm in the old gym/cafeteria. Please come with out your child and learn all about the wonders of Kindergarten! We will be doing several important things in the classroom as well, so I do request that everyone attend!

Here's a few fun shots from our first week in Kindergarten... Happy Friday! :-) Mrs. Weckstein

Wednesday, August 30th

YES!!! If you are seeing this blog it means that you have read my letter home for your child and you and have followed up with the classroom blog! I will use this throughout the year for newsletters, photos, etc. and ask you to follow along on our journey through Kindergarten!

More to come soon :-). Jen Weckstein

Friday, May 6th

Wooooosh!! It's been such a long time since I have posted on the Blog!! We have been having the most jam-packed, fun-tastic, crazy, busy days in Kindergarten in the last month!! I apologize for not communicating earlier besides an email here and there!

Thank you, thank you, thank you for ALL of the love this week for Teacher Appreciation Week!! The cards, pictures, chocolate, crafts, cookies, chocolate, emails, school supplies and CHOCOLATE have just been awesome! It truly is a blessing for me to get to spend my days with 19 of the smartest, most curious little Kindergarten kids at Dublin. I love this bunch so much and cannot believe we are running out of time together!

Reader's Workshop:  Our big focus the last two months has been on retelling the events of a story. This is a major comprehension skill that our kiddoes will want to continue to get better as as they grow up reading! We have talked about how every story needs a beginning, middle, ending, a setting and characters. We have spent a lot of time using "Chicken Little" as our mentor text and used it to have a great discussion about the problem and solution. Our Sight Word list has grown as well to include the following words: a, am, are, be, can, go, have, has, is, it, I like, look, me, not, of, on, see, to, this, the, wind, we, will, you, your. These are all words we want our kiddoes to be able to read, write and spell correctly!

Writer's Workshop: We recently finished up our Close Reading Unit using the mentor text "Bear Snores On" and used that informational fiction unit to spring us onto our non-fiction writing unit! We have been doing close readings and research on dolphins the last two weeks! Be sure to ask your child what they have learned about this sea creature! Soon we will move into individual animal reports, a favorite in Kindergarten!  Thank you for continuing to send the writing folders back and forth with your child each week! Take a moment to look back at how far they have come in their writing and you'll simply be shocked!

Math Workshop: Unit 6 Home Links are coming home today! Make sure to wrap up unit 5 and get those sent back soon! We have been working a great deal on skip counting: counting by 2's, 5's and 10's. We have also been spending a ton of time lately on number scrolls! Be sure to ask your mathematician to tell you how high they have gotten their scroll to be already!

A special thank you to all of the parents who helped chaperone our field trip to the Health Exploration Stations - we had a wonderful day!!

And last but not least....

March 4, 2016

Happy Friday Weckie Families!

What a fun and busy last few weeks we have been having in Kindergarten!! We celebrated the 100th day of school, we completed the igloo building, we celebrated like 102 Dalmatians and we even kicked of March is Reading Month with Green Eggs and Ham for breakfast in honor of Dr. Seuss and his birthday!! Phew!  Please be sure to follow us on Twitter to see pics along the way!! Our user name is @WeAreTheWeckies .

Reader's Workshop
In Workshop we have been busy!! We have continued to add on new sight words to our list. The list now includes the following words: a, am, are, be, by can, go, have, I, in, is, it, like, me, not, of, on, see, to, the, you. Please make sure to continue to review these words with your reader at home. We have spent time in Mini-Lessons learning to look for patterns in sentences, learning to look for sight words and then we have started building our strategies for tricky words!  We are learning to break words apart into a beginning, middle and ending sound before we put them all together. It ties in beautifully with what we are learning to do in Writer's Workshop!

Please see the Dublin Times for info on the March is Reading Month incentive program Dublin is participating in with the SkyZone locations around Metro Detroit. For five books read with your child in the month of March, you simply need to print and sign the form, return it to school, and your child will receive a voucher for a free 30 minute jump session!

Also, if you are interested in volunteering to be a Mystery Reader in March for our class, please email me ASAP! I'm gradually replying to emails and booking in the dates/times for this fun activity.

Writer's Workshop
In Writer's Workshop we have begun a new unit on "How-To's". The objective of this unit is to become a teacher and explain sequential steps for an activity. How to sharpen a pencil, how to clean a playroom, how to build a sandcastle, how to brush your teeth, etc. If you're ever looking for something for your child to write about in their home writing folder, a how-to would be perfect practice for them to tie in their writing in school to their writing at home! We are learning to use transition words like: first, then, next, last, second, third, etc. Then we add sequential illustrations to match each step of the directions.

Please make sure your child's writing folder is returned each week. Sadly I only receive about half of the folders back on Mondays and would like to see all participating in this extension activity!

Math Workshop
In Math Workshop we have been doing all sorts of things! We have been working with double-tens frames to help practice our "teens". We have been working on filling in hundreds grids that have some of the numbers there for us already and then completing them. We have been practicing counting by 2s, 5s and 10s. Also just this week we created a tally chart and bar graph of our favorite colors in Kindergarten. It was cool to see everyone work together to gather our data. Please make sure you are working on Unit 4 home links! I have had a few parents ask for prior unit homelinks and those will come home on Friday - I just needed to make new copies :-).

Upcoming Important Dates:
Monday, March 7: Book Fair Preview - no shopping (9:30am) and Spring Pictures (11am)
Tuesday, March 8: Book Fair Shopping (2:40-3:10pm)
Thursday, March 10: Dublin Family Literacy Night 6:30-8pm and Book Fair will be open throughout :-)

Friday, January 22nd

Greetings from the Tundra!!
Not only does the weather feel like the Arctic, but we have the giant igloo taking shape in our classroom!! Thank you to everyone who has been collecting milk jugs, and yes, we need MORE milk jugs!! We can really use any kind of gallon jug that is shaped like a milk jug.

Please click the link below to see our progress!
Igloo Building

This past week we also took a great field trip to the Marquis Theatre!  A special thanks to the parents who accompanied us on this field trip. We enjoyed watching the musical production of Snow White. Our kids were shocked to see that the cast was mostly children just like them! Be sure to check out this link to see more about upcoming shows at the Marquis Theatre in Northville.

Reader's Workshop
Upon returning from Winter Break I have been working on several different reading and writing assessments with our kids! It has been so eye opening for me to see all of the growth our students are making in reading and writing. Specifically I have been looking at: reading fluency, engagement in texts, comprehension of texts, written letter formation, rhyming, segmenting, phonemic blending and sight word recognition. As a result, new reading partnerships have been established based on ability and new reading groups will begin on Monday! If your child's book bag has not yet been turned in, please make sure that it is here on Monday. This is the best and safest way to make sure books get home and back to school responsibly!

Sight word envelopes came home last week filled with cards of our current words. Please use these cards!! Many of our kids have said they took them home but have not used them. In order for your child to be able to spell, read and write 80% of our sight words by the end of the year, daily practice at school and at home is essential. The current list includes the words: a, be, can, go, have, I, is, it, like, me, see, the, to, you. With adult supervision, you can also check out Harry Kindergarten on Youtube for great sight word songs we have been practicing at school!

Writer's Workshop
We are working on completing our Personal Narrative Writing Unit! At the conclusion, every child will have their own short personal narrative story. Look for a packet of writing to come home with your child in the next week! You will see many written pieces in the drafting stage and many that have made it to the published stage of writing. Be sure to celebrate each piece with your child or encourage them at home to finish up something that they haven't completed yet!

Writing Folders will begin to come home next week! Each Monday your child will bring home their writing folder. Please make sure they spend time throughout the week with an adult drafting 2-3 written pieces! Ideas can be tricky sometimes, so you may want to encourage them to think of places they like to go, foods they like to eat, toys they like to play with, etc. Some strategies that work well at school for helping them to write words include:

-Drawing lines on the page in a marker for each word they want to write (for example, if they want to say: The dog is brown. You could write on their paper _____ _____ __ ________. Roughly estimating the length of the line for each word.
-Incorporating sight words from our list that our kids should already be able to spell fluently
-Saying words slowly so that kids can stretch out the sounds in the word (and it's okay if the spelling isn't perfect when they do it this way, in fact, it's better!)
-Breaking words apart to hear the sounds with them (for example, cat = /c/ + /a/ + /t/), so you help them hear the sounds and they record the corresponding sound

Math Workshop
We have been busy, busy, busy in Math as of late! Unit 3 Homelinks have gone home and we are moving along nicely! There has been lots of great work done lately around tens-frames. I have included a few pictures below to show you what they look like and how they help us to add numbers up to 10.

We have also explored using number lines to add two numbers as well as counters in groups! Both are great strategies when first learning how to add. This would be something neat you could do at home with your kiddo... adding cereal boxes, adding snacks, adding vegetables on your plate, etc. Math is all around us!

We have also been working on learning about shapes! Shape names we are learning include: square, triangle, circle, oval, rectangle, parallelogram, trapezoid, pentagon and hexagon! We have been practicing drawing shapes with tracers. We have been graphing shapes and we have been counting the sides and corners of shapes. You can point out shapes everywhere at home and see what your kiddo notices! The homelink from Unit 2 did this and this would be something to keep exploring with your children!

Our mathematicians have been diligently working on hundreds grids and learning how to fill them in with different numbers missing in the grid!  It's fun to see how aware they are now of number patterns when written in a grid and how fluently they are able to count orally!

Last but not least, we have begun our work with money! We have spent time with the penny and even read a book all about pennies! We are learning to count pennies and determine if we have enough money to buy different things all with values under ten cents! Please get the pennies out at home and help your child explore with this coin value too!

Science:
This week we took a look at Mr. Maple in his winter season. We described the weather in winter and then we went outside and visited our friend. We noticed that all of his leaves had fallen down and many could be seen under the thin layer of snow! Scientists observed that the branches on Mr. Maple had in fact grown and the new sprouts were red! We then found buds on the tips of every single branch! We are excited to see what will happen to the sprouts and buds this spring!


Upcoming Important Dates:
Wednesday, January 27: Quarter 2 Report Cards Available on Skyward (Please let me know if you need help logging on to skyward. A paper copy will not be coming home this marking period or for the rest of the school year).

Sunday, February 27: PTA 6th Annual Crop Day - come support an awesome PTA day of scrapbooking or doing a craft of your choice... All three meals, snacks and contests with prizes make this a must attend day at Dublin. Besides, you'll get to see me! :-) Please keep an eye in the Dublin Times for more info.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Hello Weckie Families!!

 It has been AWHILE!! We have been so busy having SO much fun in Kindergarten these last few weeks!!! There is lots to share and lots to tell...

Reader's Workshop:
Guided Reading Groups have started in our classroom over the last few weeks! Everyone is in a group and the groups meet either M/W/FR or T/TH. I will do my best to meet with each group every day although some days will be easier than others with loads of special events coming up in this month of December. Please keep an eye out for your child's book bag coming home. It does not need to be returned daily and it would be wonderful to spend a couple of nights reading these books or doing the letter/sound activity cards your child is bringing home. Remember, we encourage everyone to take 20 mins of time a day to read with your child. My own son Liam LOVES the time we spend each night reading with him... and often times if we skip over one of his favorite books, he has a fit! Thank you for signing the forms that come home in the book bags as well!

In Workshop we have been spending the last week learning how to read with a partner! Everyone has an assigned partner or two who is reading exactly like them, at the same level. Most are in reading groups together as well. With partners we have been learning how to sit together, how to share the book, how to take turns picking the book and how to take turns reading the pages. We practice with our familiar book and look for known words in more complicated texts. The kids LOVE reading around the room with their partner.

Sight Words - our list is growing!! Please make sure you are spending time with these words at home to reinforce the work we are doing at school with these words. Our list includes: see, the, a, is, I, it, like, can, to, go, be, me, do. Be sure to practice writing and reading these words at home with your son or daughter! Flash cards, white boards, even shaving cream on a clean surface are a great way to practice writing all of our words!

Writer's Workshop:
In Writer's Workshop we have been working on writing like a reader! We have been learning about characters and using a character to tell the story. We have been working on adding details to our illustrations and adding words to our work. Sight words have been used frequently to help construct sentences in our writing. In January we will start using weekly writing folders that will come home with your child! Keep an eye out for this soon!

Math Workshop:
We have been SUPER busy in Math Workshop, focusing in on counting numbers and learning about shapes! We have been sorting shapes by features, finding shapes in advertisements and making shape collages, working with magnetic shapes on the white board, working with pattern block shapes to make tangrams and more! We are working on: circle, triangle, square, and rectangle currently! We have been practicing writing our numbers up to 100 and did our blank hundreds grid for December. We have also just begun looking at clocks and telling time to the nearest hour! Please work on your Unit 2 home links and return them either prior or after break. It is important that you do these activities together, but not rushed in one night!

Important Upcoming INFO:
Friday, December 18: Begin building Gingerbread Houses - we need all donations of graham crackers by Friday - thank you!!
Monday, December 21: Decorate Gingerbread Houses with reading buddies - we need all decorations by Monday am - thank you!!
Tuesday, December 22: 2:30pm: All School Sing Along in the Old Gym (parents are welcome, expect a crowd in the parking lot and signing into the school) followed by our classroom party (Polar Express Trip) in our room at 3:00pm.