Kindergarten Announcements
January 4, 2019
Welcome back and Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! I hope that all of you enjoyed your holiday with family and friends and that everyone is rested.
It is hard to believe that we are beginning our second semester of Kindergarten. The skills that the students will be learning are becoming more difficult. Students will need to have mastered previous taught skills to be successful with their new learning. Please continue to work with your child at home. Encourage your child to read, write, and practice their number concepts daily. Ask your child what they are learning in school and have them explain to you what their learning means. It is important that children be able to explain their thinking and be able to communicate effectively.
My goal for the second half of the year is to help your child feel confident and ready for first grade. Please help in this venture by giving your child one or two new chores to do at home such as setting the table, emptying the trash, bringing in the mail, etc. If you usually help your child a great deal, allow them a safe opportunity to gain pride from accomplishing a task on their own. I do not unpack backpacks at school. I do not write answers for them. They can, and do find pride in knowing they can do "grown up" things. We are encouraging more "first grade" type behavior as we enter the second half of Kindergarten. The level of expectation has increased and students are going to be more challenged in how they perform behaviorally each day. I urge you to let this be a time of growth. This is a vital step for success in first grade.
This Month in Kindergarten
In writing, students will be exploring explanatory and informational writing. They will be learning to write about how to do something using time-orders words such as first, next, then and last. Also, students will learn to write about a topic using words such as can, have, are. Eventually, students will participate in shared research with teacher support regarding winter animals such as penguins and polar bears.
In math, we are beginning our study of 2-D and 3-D shapes. Students will be learning new words such as "flat, solid, and quadrilateral! Students are expected to be able to identify correctly circles, triangles, rectangles, squares, cubes, cones, cylinders, spheres, and hexagons! Please review these words with your child at home and help your child locate these shapes in the world!
Finally in Social Studies and Science our focus will be on Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as rocks and soil. Students will be expected to tell about why our country celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. Kindergarteners should be able to communicate that MLK believed that all people should be treated the same and that he was from Atlanta.
Reading Groups
Students need to return their reading books everyday. They need to be in your child's backpack. If your child's group did not meet, it is helpful to reread the book from the night before. This helps with confidence and fluency. As always, students are encouraged to read their own books or books from the library.
Waterford Early Learning Progam at MPES
Students will be logging into the Waterford Learning program daily at school. They can access this program through their GCPS E-Class page. The experience is personalized for each child and is meant to be completed individually. Students are expected to complete one 15 minute session each day in Reading during their center time and will be going to the computer lab as a class at least once a week to complete a 30 minute session in math/science. This program provides the classroom teacher with personalized information regarding each child's program including strengths and weaknesses, as well as reports that can be shared with parents at conferences.
We ask that students do not access their Waterford program at home and it should only be used at school. We ask that you and siblings not assist your child in answering questions as this will move them through the program at a faster rate than is appropriate for their learning as well as make it too difficult to be completed independently at school.