September Citizen of the Month and weekly update

September Citizen of the Month-Lydia Johnson

Congrats to Lydia Johnson, our September Citizen of the Month!  Lydia was chosen by her classroom peers for exhibiting the 5 traits we hope to see in all of our students, faculty and staff at Beulah Ralph Elementary: kind, respectful, responsible, positive, problem solver. 

We have talked all year about what these 5 words mean and how to live them in our daily lives.  Each child then had a "ballot" with every child's name from our classroom on it.  They highlighted the friend who they thought deserved the award this month.  Lydia was a great first choice!  She was honored at an assembly on Thursday with the other Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade classrooms and winners.  Every classroom, K-5, will have a winner and assembly near the end of each month. The specialist teachers will also pick one GRADE level "Citizen of the Month" as well.  If your child is chosen you will be notified so that you can attend the assembly.  We keep the winner a secret from the students until their name is announced at the assembly.  

K-2 September Citizens of the Month

September Reading Logs

Please have your child turn in their September Reading Log on Monday.  An October Reading Log is in their Friday Folder this week.  We encourage you to read to/with your child for at least 15 minutes, Monday-Thursday and record it on their reading log. 

Scholastic Book Orders

Check your child's Friday Folder for Scholastic Book Orders.  You can order online with our classroom code or with the paper copy.  More information is in the folder.  They are due by next Friday. 

A look our our learning this week...

Fundations-we learned the name, letter sound and correct letter formation for the lowercase "a" and "g."  These were a bit trickier for everyone.  I encourage everyone to practice them at home, making sure your child says the verbal prompts while forming the letters.  You can find the verbal prompts in the weekly packets that come home in the Friday Folders.  

We have learned the following lowercase letters: t, b, f, n, m, i, u, c, o, a, g.  Please hold your child accountable for forming these letters correctly when writing, especially if they have one of these letters in their first name.  

Shared Reading-our new word wall word this week is "at."  We read the big book We Are and the silly poem Little Squirrel, both featuring the word "at."  Ask your child to tell you about our "high five" on the way out of our classroom door.  It is a fun way we practice reading our current word wall word.  Your child should be able to read, write and spell all of our word wall words: I, a, am, at.

Daily 5-ask your child to tell you about all of the different things they have to read in their book boxes during "Read to Self" time.  

Math-we began our unit on numbers and counting.  We are currently focusing on numbers 0-6.  We played several games to help us with these numbers: Roll & Color, Roll & Build and Color Caper.  Ask your child about these games.  By parent teacher conference time in November we expect Kindergartners to be able to count to at least 30 and write numbers to at least 10.  We work on this at school, but extra practice at home would be great as well! Check out the pictures of us playing Roll & Build!

                     

Writing Workshop-we continue to work on writing real stories about our lives. These can be simple things such as going on a walk with our family or big things like a vacation. Talk with your child each night about things they did that day that they could write about at school during writing workshop. We are working hard on labeling our pictures and trying to add words to tell our story.  

Friday Crafts-you might have noticed that every Friday we do a craft in our classroom.  It's a fun way to end the week!  Crafts help with so many things: creativity, following directions, fine motor skills through cutting, gluing and coloring.  Sometimes they will bring the crafts home that day and sometimes we decorate our room with them for a few weeks.  Today we read the books The Bumpy Little Pumpkin and The Ugly Pumpkin and made our own pumpkins!  We are getting excited for our field trip to the pumpkin patch in a couple of weeks!  

Enjoy the beautiful weather this weekend!