LANGUAGE ARTS (Reading, Writing, & Phonics)

   Dr. Seuss was our March author of the month; we read many of the Seuss books and the children were happy to be able to read many themselves. We will be reading Fancy Nancy and some other familiar books in preparation for our field trip on May 7^th this month.      

    In phonics we continue to review sounds and are writing every day. We review the sentence structure; capital, spacing and period. We are also working on our sight words (I, a, the, go, in, is, me, to, you, see, my, said, and, we, give): we practice reading our list of words and create sight word books. We began working with blends/chunks (i.e. br, bl, ck) and digraphs (wh, ch, th, sh), which we call the “h brothers”.  

     We are writing every day; as a class we brainstorm about an idea and then the children are given a topic sentence to write about or they choose from a list they made and write about that topic. We continue to work on sentence structure and the proper use of punctuation and spacing. I encourage the students to use their “best guess spelling”, which may not be spelled correctly in the English language, but is when read phonetically (i.e. would might be spelled wud). They practice stretching out the words and writing down all the sounds they hear.  

MATH

   We began working in Ch. 7 “Time and Money”. Students worked on telling and writing time to the hour, talked about morning, noon and night, and attributes of the penny, nickel and dime. We began to work on counting money as well. Play coins have been added to the math center to encourage the children to continue to work on counting money.

RELIGION

     We focused a lot on the passion during lent; I hope all of you were able to see the wonderful Lent book your child made during our study. We worked with each station and talked about the struggle of Jesus and ways we can help others today the way Simon, Veronica, Mary and Joseph helped Jesus. During Holy Week we focused on the special events surrounding that week: Holy Thursday – The Last Supper, Good Friday and the resurrection on Easter Sunday.

SCIENCE/SOCIAL STUDIES

      We introduced a couple new science centers: 1. Gobstopper science, where the students have to watch the gobstopper change colors and record their observations and 2. Sorting creatures, students have to sort snakes, lizards, bugs and frogs into their appropriate category. We worked on parts of a plant and will be potting our own plants in the classroom – look for those to come home in a few weeks! We finished up a unit on the five senses, each child made a book about the senses, which will be on display for SCI-MA-TECH and then sent home.    

     We are using the “second step” program which teaches the children about feelings and ways to get along with other people. We learned about body and facial language, using kind words, fairness and just because a friend doesn’t want to play the same thing as us doesn’t mean they don’t want to be our friend!

     We studied needs vs. wants and using the smart board in the computer lab, sorted things that we need (items we can’t live without) and those things we want (would LOVE to have, but don’t need to live). We also completed a few worksheets and played a game with needs and wants.

Field Trip – Kindergarten and 1st grade will be going to The Village Theatre to see Fancy Nancy and other stories on Monday, May 7^th – please send back permission slip with check made payable to St. Pius X as soon as possible. We will need 4 drivers, which will be a first come, first serve basis.

 Sci-Ma-Tech – Thursday, May 3rd from 6:30 – 7:30pm, come and see the exciting math and science skills we have been learning throughout the year. The kindergarteners will show and explain various activities and centers we have done this year.

 Chunk Bag – Be on the lookout for the “chunk bag”! We will be learning many blends/chunks for the next few weeks and ask students to help us by bringing in an item that corresponds to their chunk. (i.e. br – bracelet or fl – flower)

Kindergarten Graduation and year end – Kindergarten graduation has been changed to Thursday June 14^th due to the snow day make up. Graduation will be held at 9am in the gym and this will be the last day for Kindergarten, thus after graduation all kindergarten students will be done with their school year and you can take them home (or go out to celebrate)! More information to follow.

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