I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. My family traveled to New Hampshire to visit my parents.

I would like to thank everyone for coming to conferences last week. This marks the first time I have not had any cancellations and I appreciate your efforts to be there.

Today I introduced q and z, bringing us to twenty four letters so far. As we are learning all of the lower case letters we are spending greater chunks of time on creating and manipulating words and sentences, which is very exciting.

In the next few weeks we will be talking about different holiday traditions and begin a study of the five senses.

This week I introduced the letters p and j. We have been working on the formation of these two letters as well as letters that have previously been introduced. In addition we have been talking about sentence structure- groups of words, always beginning with a capital letter, some kind of end punctuation. Today as part of handwriting students were writing very simple sentences such as The sun is big.

We are continuing our work with patterns during math. This week we have used the Smart Board to predict what comes next in patterns or to create our own patterns. The children are getting very good at identifying and naming patterns-- AB, AAB etc.

We have started writing our own story called If You Give a Cheetah Chocolate. This is based on If You Give A Mouse a Cookie and other books by Laura Joffe Numeroff. Ask your child what happens if you give a cheetah chocolate.

With a snow day, early release for the whole school on Wednesday, and ski and skate sale there was a lot of energy in the air this week! This was particularly evident with kindergartners at recess. They tend to burst out the door and run, run, run, which is great, but eventually this tends to turn into tagging, which then turns into roughness. We had many conversations about what is and is not appropriate on the playground. Hands need to be kept to ourselves unless we are playing a tag game in which case gentle tags are appropriate. Today we brainstormed good things to do at recess, including several tag games.

Report cards will be going home next Friday. I am looking forward to meeting with all of you at conferences. Please be sure to let me know if you can't make your scheduled time and we can reschedule for another time.

Have a great weekend!

This week I introduced the letters l, k, and h, which are all sky line letters. We practiced correct formation for these letters and used them to make some words as well.

There has been a lot of excitement during Writer's Workshop the last two weeks. Several students have published books and many more are very close. The criteria for a first published book was pages with pictures and some words. For the second published book students need to make sure the pages are connected and include some sentences. These may have full words or just the beginning sounds of words.

We will be wrapping up our study of rocks by talking about the different uses of rocks, past and present. Ask your child some of the important ways that rocks are used.

Today I read a book called Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud. Ask your child what it means to fill a bucket and how this can be done.

Today I sent home a letter from Cat Fair, our guidance counselor, introducing herself and the guidance program at the school. Because she doesn't formally meet with the kindergarten class until the last trimester, she will be meeting with small groups of students from the class on Fridays to play a game. This will serve the dual purpose of helping her get to know the kindergarten students and giving students in the class a chance to spend time with each other in a smaller group setting. When invited, the children may choose whether or not they would like to go with her, but I am encouraging everyone to go at least once. Those who have been thus far have really enjoyed it.

The children have also really enjoyed lunch meetings with me in the library. If your child hasn't been yet they will definitely be invited next week. Again this is optional, but so far most students are eager for the opportunity.

We have also had several discussions in the class about being ourselves and making decisions based on what we want rather than what someone else is doing. There has been a trend among the boys of crowding a particular student, wanting to sit only where he sits, and do only what he does. We have talked about the importance of giving people personal space. While this particular student has many admirable qualities worth emulating, I am trying to help the children recognize that they each have wonderful qualities too and their classmates will be more apt to see this if they are authentic. Please reinforce this idea with your child.

Please let me know as soon as possible if your conference time does not work for you so we. Have a great weekend.

A letter about parent conferences with your child's scheduled time was sent home today. All kindergarten conferences have been scheduled for Monday, November 22nd. If for some reason that day or your scheduled time won't work I am happy to reschedule on a different day at 9:00 or 11:30. If you are a morning person I would also be happy to meet with you before school any day. Please look for the letter in your child's bag and let me know if you need to make a change.

Today we looked at sandstone and limestone, both examples of sedimentary rocks. The limestone sample that Emma shared with us has lots of little fossils in it. We talked about how these rocks were made when layers of mud, clay, sand, rocks, shells and other things were pressed together over a long period of time. We then used different colors of clay to make our own sedimentary rocks.

This week I introduced the letters u and e. I put a sheet showing the formations for s, d, u, and e in your child's red folder. We have now been introduced to all of the vowels and nine consonants. We are able to make quite a few words! In math we have begun a unit on patterns. I also included a note about this in your child's folder.

Emma brought in a box of labeled rocks, lent to her by a co-worker of her mother's. We examined two of the igneous rocks this morning, pumice and granite. Students noticed a big difference in the way the two rocks felt when we passed them around. The pumice was very light. We talked about why that might be and came to the conclusion that it had a lot of air pockets. Amy commented that it was like a sponge. We ended the day by erupting a volcano (baking soda and vinegar) and observing all of the air bubbles. We then imagined what it would be like if this concoction was really lava and quickly hardened. We will continue exploring rocks this through the week.