Have a great summer!

We wanted to share the pictures from our last week together! We started the week with our Awards and Field Day. We had a blast! The huge soccer ball was a favorite of the day. We spent the rest of the week dancing, singing, and playing together with our themed days. Enjoy the pictures! We hope that everyone is enjoying summer so far!

The end is near...

It is hard to believe that we are in the last week of the school year! We have had alot of fun together this year! We hope that our students have enjoyed this year as much as we have. We wanted to end the year with some fun activities. Here is the schedule of events for this week and some reminders for the last day:

Monday, June 1st: Field Day and Awards
We will be participating in a field day in the morning. At 2:15 we will have our final awards ceremony of the year! This is a day you don’t want to miss!

Tuesday, June 2nd: Movie and Crazy Sock Day
Bring your favorite RATED G movie to share! Make sure to wear a pair of crazy
socks!

Wednesday, June 3rd: Game Day
Bring your favorite game. Please make sure it is a game you know how to play so that you can teach it to your friends! Make sure the game is labeled with your name and any loose pieces are in a bag!

Thursday, June 4th: Clean Sweep and Favorite Music Day
Today we will be cleaning our classroom! Wear your cleaning clothes and get ready to clean to music! Students can bring their favorite CD!

Friday, June 5th: Last Day
Please make sure students bring planners and backpacks today! Report cards will not be handed to students! Report cards will not be given to students who still owe money for pictures. Dismissal begins at 11:45 a.m., please be prompt, all students need to be picked up by noon!

We are looking forward to a great week!

Happy Mother's Day

On Friday was our Mother's Day Breakfast! If you had to miss it, here is the video we showed! Enjoy! :)

Untitled from Julia Lewis on Vimeo.

End of the Year Expectations

It is hard to believe that there are only 28 days of school left this year! We have seen our students soar this year. Here are some of the things we expect Kindergarteners to be able to do at this point of the year:



Skills/Reading

-Students should be reading level B books independently

-Students should be able to answer questions about a story

-Students should be able to identify and write at least 30 sight words



Writing

-Students should be writing in complete sentences

-Students should be using the correct punctuation

-Students should be able to include a beginning, middle, and ending in their story

-Students should be able to write phonetically (write the sounds they hear in each word)

-Students should be able to correctly spell several sight words in their writing



Math

-Students should be able to identify, write, and correctly order numbers 0-30

-Students should be able to count by 5's and 10's

-Students should be able to represent a number 0-30 using tally marks or objects

-Students should know the days of the week in order, be able to identify each day on the

calendar, know how to use a calendar to find out what day of the week a particular date is on

and what day comes before/after.

How are you celebrating?

Today was full of celebrating! Not only was it Miss Thomson's Birthday...

but it is also Earth Day!

Our class decided to celebrate Earth Day by picking up the trash around our playground. The students were so serious about beautifying our playground, that they gave up their recess time to find more trash! We would love to hear some of the ways you are celebrating Earth Day!

CLICK HERE TO PLAY SOME FUN EARTH DAY GAMES!

Raising Money for Relay for Life

As you know, this year Chets Creek will be hosting the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life event on May 1st and 2nd! To get our kids involved in making a difference, we are holding a COIN COLLECTION DRIVE at our school. Starting this week we will be collecting coins in our classroom. Students can bring in spare change to donate to cancer. You can help them earn change by letting them do chores around the house, by doing extra reading, and more! Students will also have a chance to earn change to put in our jug through positive behavior in our classroom. The coin drive will go until Friday, April 24th. Last year, we raised almost $3,000, so let’s do it again!

We also want to invite families to come out to the event! Both of us (Miss Thomson and Miss Lewis) have been a part of the planning for this event all year long. We will both be there the entire 18 hours! We would love to see our students and families come walk with us and join in on the activities. The event begins at 6:00 on Friday, May 1st. You can come for an hour or bring your family to camp out for the night! Let us know if you are interested! As always, thank you for your support.

Spring Fever

We came back from Spring Break with a BANG! Our last couple of days have been full of "spring-ish" activities. On Wednesday, we went on our final field trip of the year to the Jacksonville Zoo. We got to see the new babies and even the new Komodo Dragon exhibit! Below are some pictures from our exciting day:

On Thursday, hundreds of colorful eggs were hidden around our playground. We hunted for eggs until we had each collected fifteen eggs. We spent the rest of the day participating in spring activities. Check out the photos from our Egg Hunt:

CATCH THAT LEPRECHAUN!

Our St. Patrick's Day was full of GREEN! We set up the creative Leprechaun traps the students made before we left our classroom for lunch (just in case any Leprechauns should come by). When we returned, our classroom was a MESS!!! The Leprechauns left some traces behind, but unfortunately, we were unable to catch any! We did, however, see one pass by our classroom window!

Book Talk

We are now a couple of weeks into our Eric Carle Author Study. Students have become familiar with his books and are making connections with them during their book talks and in their writing. Students have been focusing on two main connections: text-to-self (connecting a book with something that has happened to them) and text-to-text (making connections between two or more books). The writing sample above is an explanation of text-to-text connections written by a student : "I am writing about text-to-text connections. If you do not know what it means I will tell you. It means that your book has a connection with another book. My connection is about The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the book called The Very Lonely Firefly."
Connections help with students' comprehension of a story. We encourage students to make connections with stories they are reading at home as well. Below are some examples of questions that can be used to facilitate student connections at home:
Text-to-Self:
What does this book remind you of?
Has something like this ever happened to you before?
How did you feel when you read this book?
Text-to-Text:
Does this remind you of something that happened in another book?
How is this book different from other books you have read?
Does this character remind you of a character from another book you have read?

Will You Be My Valentine?

On Friday, our class participated in various Valentine-themed centers planned by parents. The kids had an amazing time. We even had a snowcone machine! The quote of the day was from Lily: "I never had a best day in my whole life like this!" Thank you to all the parents who donated food, items, and/or their time to make this such a great day for the students! Enjoy the pictures from our fun day!

SHAPES

Last week we looked at 2-D Shapes: triangle, circle, oval, square, rectangle, rhombus, trapezoid, and hexagons. We made a Shape Mural, made pattern block pictures, and even made our own "Book of Shapes" by turning 2-D shapes into people, animals, and/or things.

Table 3 Sharing their Shape Mural of the Ocean

This week we are identifying 3-D shapes: cube, rectangular prism, sphere, cone, triangular prism, and cylinder. Tomorrow we will take a Shape Hunt around our classroom to look for 3-D shapes. Students will be given a Shape Hunt paper to take home. They will look around their house for 3-D Shapes.

Examples:

• cylinder - soda can, trash can, mustard bottle, etc.
• cube - microwave, box, ice cube, etc.
• sphere - orange, basketball, etc.
• rectangular prism - refridgerator, cereal box, etc.
• cone - ice cream cone, party hat, etc.
• triangular prism - tent, piece of cake, etc.

HAPPY HUNTING!

Alex's Lemonade Stand

Kindergarten has continued the Alex's Lemonade Stand tradition to raise money to fight childhood cancer. One or two of the Kindergarten classes will be at the various after school events handing out lemonade. There will be a donation box for any donations to the Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation. Our class, along with Mrs. Meissner's, had the privilage of running Alex's Lemonade Stand at the PTA Family Night last Tuesday. We are proud to say that we collected $116 for the fight against childhood cancer! Thank you to all those who came out to help and those who donated to this great cause!!

Letter Combinations and Digraphs

We have started letter combinations and digraphs in Skills Block. Consonant digraphs are two consonants that join together to make one sound, such as ch, sh, th, wh, and ph. Letter combinations are two or three certain letters that make one sound when they come together. Here are the rhymes to help us remember letter combinations:
ay ay - see kids play
er ir ur - see the church
ar ar - drive the car
ow ow - one brown cow
st st - you must stop
ing ing - watch me swing
oy oi - see the boy
ea ee - let's go to the beach
oo oo - the ghost says boo
ue ew - find the clue
oo oo - read the book
au aw - I can draw
or or - shut the door
eigh eigh - this is eight
ou ou - see the mouse
ow ow - see the snow
all all - catch the ball

This week we are working on digraphs: th, ch, and sh. We are also working on the -ar letter combination and reviewing the -ay letter combination. Watch to see if your child recognizes digraphs and letter combinations in their reading and also uses them in their writing!

ALL ABOARD

Dressed in our pajamas, we boarded the Polar Express Train to celebrate the holiday season together.!We participated in fun holiday-themed centers that parents put together for us! We even watched The Polar Express movie. We had a wonderful day together. Enjoy the pictures from our day!

We hope that you and your family have a wonderful and restful holiday! See you January 5th!

To celebrate all of our hard work and the holiday season, we decided to take a break from normalcy this week. Each day this week has a wintery theme, and in each of our workshops we did activities according to that theme. Math included! To celebrate Monday's gingerbread theme, we played a dice game called "Roll-A-Gingerbread Man." The students had to roll the dice, and based on what they rolled, had to add a certain part to their gingerbread man. On Tuesday, we enjoyed a snowman themed day. We read stories about snowmen and wrote "How to Build a Snowman" stories, but our favorite part was the "Melt-An-Ice Cube" Game in Math! Similar to the "Roll-A-Gingerbread Man" game, we rolled dice to see what we would do to the ice cube in order to get it to melt (such as breathe on the ice cube for 10 seconds, drop it, shake salt on it, etc.). The students came to the conclusion that placing the ice cube in water and putting salt on the ice cubes helped it melt the fastest. Enjoy the pictures from Monday and Tuesday's Math Workshops! We are looking forward to tomorrow's "Polar Express" Day! "ALL ABOARD!"

**We apologize for the delay in getting the Pow Wow pictures posted! We were having so much fun on our Pow Wow celebration day that we forgot to take pictures! We are waiting to get some more pictures before posting. If you have any that you wouldn't mind sharing, please send them in. Thanks!

Preparing for Pow Wow

We have been busy busy busy preparing for Friday's Pow Wow celebration! We have learned about the Hopi Indians, made our own Hopi costumes, and made Kachina Dolls! Thank you to everyone who has sent in items and those who came in to help us! We hope that everyone will be able to attend our Pow Wow this Friday to help us celebrate the completion of our integrated unit on Native Americans. See you at our Make-and-Take Night tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. in our classroom!

This week's homework is based on the book Knots On A Counting Rope by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault. You can listen to the story read online at http://storylineonline.net/index2.html. Enjoy!

Literary Parade and Fall Centers

Enjoy the pictures from our exciting day! Thank you to everyone who helped make this day so much fun!

Native American Unit

It is a Kindergarten tradition at Chets Creek for each class to study and research different Native American tribes through an integrated unit on Native Americans. Our class will be the Hopi tribe. This week we will begin this integrated unit where we will learn all about our Native American Tribe. On Friday, November 21st, we will conclude our unit by participating in a Native American Pow Wow celebration and various centers. The homework for this coming week is to research the Hopi tribe. The following are great sites to check out:

Searchme

View in searchme: full lite

To learn more about the Southwestern Indians, check out this charity site that helps real-life Native Americans, such as the Hopi tribe, with basic life needs:

https://webmail.duvalschools.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.nrcprograms.org/site/PageServer?pagename=cin_index

Our First Field Trip

After weeks of anticipation, the big day finally arrived: FIELD TRIP DAY!! We started the day at the Metro Park Kids Campus, where we played and ate lunch. We then headed to the Florida Theatre to see one of our favorite "star" books: Harry the Dirty Dog! It was amusing during the show when the students heard one of our vocabulary words, "furiously," and immediately almost all 36 thumbs shot up in the air! The students really get into their vocabulary! Thank you to all the parents who chaperoned! The day was flawless and so much fun! Enjoy the pictures from our special day!

My Hero

One of our "Star" book vocabulary words for Little Red Riding Hood was "hero." The hunter was a "hero" at the end of the story because he saved Little Red Riding Hood and her granny from the wolf. The students were asked to draw a picture of their hero. It was interesting to see their perspective of a hero:

Sydni said her heroes are her parents!


Mia said her heroes are the people in the Army and Navy!


Markis said his hero was his dad because he is in the Army!


Emma said that her hero was her daddy because he is a firefighter and he saves people!

Ask your child who their hero is!