April 26, 2019 Newsletter

Dear Parents,

I hope you all had a wonderful vacation! I loved hearing all the stories that your children came back with! They were all excited to share what special times you had last week.

We have had a busy week in Room 115!  We have started learning all about seeds, trees, and plants.  We will start learning about insects soon. The students made trees and labeled each of the parts at the art table. They wrote in their journals about their vacations, what trees give us, and about how seeds travel. Their writing is coming along nicely. We have been practicing putting spaces between our words, periods at the end of the sentences, and uppercase letters at the beginning of sentences.  They will continue writing narrative stories during the next couple of weeks and will be writing stories about themselves and some things they have done!

We have read several of Eric Carle’s books this week.  We started making our own versions of “The Very Busy Spider.”  These will come home when they are finished.  We also read “The Tiny Seed” and have started making our own giant flowers in the art area.  We also finished a class book called “If There Were No Trees.”  Please be sure to return all class books as soon as you are done reading them.

We took more pictures of different plants/trees around our school this week. We have been discussing the changes in nature we have been observing.  I would encourage you to do something similar at home if you are able to.  I would love for students to bring in their pictures or drawings in a few weeks to show us the changes in nature they observed at their homes!  We also planted pumpkin seeds in our classroom this afternoon.  We will make observations about how they grow and students will take them home in a couple of weeks.

The students enjoyed their SOAR reward time this afternoon.  They got to pick an activity (either playing games in the gym, playing board games in the library, or doing art projects in the art room). 

It certainly was a busy week!  We have more exciting happenings coming up during the month of May! 

Enjoy your weekend!

Melanie Duncan

PS...The next FW Used Bookstore is Wednesday, May 8.  Students are welcome to bring in either a quarter or a book from home to trade.

April 12, 2019 Newsletter

Dear Parents,

We celebrated the day before vacation with a whole-school assembly in the gym.  The theme was respect.  Sensei Ethan from the Elite Free Style Karate School in Bedford was our special speaker.  He talked a lot about how important respect is and how we can use our eyes, words, and actions to show respect to friends, teachers, and family.

The students finished their individual innovations called One, Two, Three, Four.  These went home yesterday in their folders.  I would encourage the children to read them as often as possible and be sure to point to the words as they read.  It is a wonderful way to reinforce their sight words in context.  The students did a great job thinking of different adjectives to describe the animals in their books.

We started a new writing unit!  Students will be writing narratives (stories about themselves) in a Writer’s Workshop format.  They got their folders set up this week and got a great start on their first stories!  It was exciting for me to see how excited they were to get started!

We finished our math topic working with teen numbers and will move on to numbers up to 100 after vacation!

I would encourage you and your child to work a lot on their sight words and math fluency facts over vacation.  May is a big assessment month for us and I will be checking students on both of these skills during the next few weeks.  I would also encourage you to read, read, read as much as possible!

We will be starting our nature unit when we return from our spring break and will be learning about life cycles, trees, seeds, and insects.  We will also be making observations about the signs of spring we see outside.  We will be taking pictures of different places around the school over a 4-6 week period and comparing the pictures every week to see how nature changes.  It may be a fun project for you to do at home too!  I would love to see the pictures when you are done if you do decide to do it!  We actually went for our first nature walk today and took some pictures that we will add to over the next several weeks.  The students also painted forsythia branches this week.  The paintings definitely make our classroom look more spring-ish!

I hope you have a fantastic, fun-filled, and relaxing week of vacation.  I look forward to hearing all the students' stories when they return!

Have a great week!

Melanie Duncan

PS… We will be going to the library the Wednesday after vacation.  Be sure to return your child’s library book.

Wishlist items:  large brown paper bags with handles, brown and black yarn, a bag of cotton balls, and tin foil

I double checked on our last day of school… because we had one snow day, our last day will be on Thursday, June 20th.  It will be a half day of school.

Sensei Ethan

Mrs. McDonald broke a piece of wood with her hand!!!

Forsythia Branches

On our nature walk....looking for signs of spring!

Relay race during the assembly.  Our team won!

April 5, 2019 Newsletter

Dear Parents,

Thank you so much for coming to our Kindergarten Museum on Thursday.  It was an exciting day for the students who got to show off a lot of the hard work they have completed over the past month or so.  They have much to be proud of!  I hope you have enjoyed looking through their artwork at home too.

We finished learning about all seven continents this week.  Asia was our last one.  The students brought their continents books home to share with their families earlier this week.

We also enjoyed going to the first grade nursery rhyme concert on Wednesday morning and were very impressed by the PTO sponsored show with Rob Surette today.  He is an inspirational painter who works for Disney.  He used music and video along with painting well-known famous people (including Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr.).  He was very inspirational and shared a lot about his journey to become the artist he is today. 

I have been enjoying my conferences with many of you and am looking forward to meeting with the rest of you next week.  Please let me know if you need a reminder about the date and time of your conference.

The Francis Wyman Used Bookstore is going to be on THURSDAY next week due to MCAS testing on Wednesday morning.  Students are welcome to bring either a quarter or a book to trade, if they would like to participate.

We are extending the due date for the Scholastic Book Club order until Monday.  It’s not too late to order books if you didn’t get a chance to already.

Spring Vacation is April 15-19.

Have a great weekend!

Melanie

Kindergarten Museum

We enjoyed our Kindergarten Museum today and are so thankful that so many of you were able to come to it!  Each Kindergarten classroom featured artwork from one of the seven different continents.  Our class brought their art projects home with them today.  Please take some time with your child to go through the projects and ask them to explain what they did!  It really was an impressive amount of work!