Week of September 21-25

Language Arts
We will continue with our Smart Start review of kindergarten skills to get us reading ready!
We will focus on phonics - identifying beginning and ending sounds. We will continue to work on rhyming pairs and building words by changing beginning sounds. We will look at letters c, f, d,h and the short e sound. We will look at sentence structure - capital letters and endmarks. We will practice sounting out syllables to identify word parts for spelling readiness. We will look at examples of fiction and nonfiction of stories and using details from a story to retell the events of a story/

High Frequency Words
this, is, my, look, little, where, here, play, the, we

We will write daily in our journal to complete writing prompts. We will look at sentence structure - the beginning of a sentence, word spacing and endmarks.


Math
We will continue to review the definition of added and sum. We will work on identifying the parts that we are adding together to make a whole. We will use a number line to count on. We will look at related addition facts (2+3=5 and 3+2=5) to understand that in addition number order does not matter. We will use our ten frame cards and counters to solve word problems. 

** Chapter 1 Assessment will be on Friday. A practice packet will be sent home on Tuesday for you to start to review. This is optional but a good way to practice the cconcepts that will be covered.

Religion
We will learn that God sent His only Son, Jesus, to us as a gift. We will talk about the Holy Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. We will understand that we are also a gift from God and must share our gifts with the world.

Science
We will review how we use our five sense to review the world around us. We will do an experiment with celery and our five senses. We will also observe what happens when we put celery in water with food coloring. 

Scholastic News
We will look at the life cycle of an apple and different ways that we use apples. We will do a fun apple volcano experiment in Science and we will graph our favorite apples. 

Week of September 14 - 18

Language Arts
This week we will do our first week of Smart Start to review some basic kindergarten skills and to assess where we are in terms of a starting point for first grade. 

We will work on the concept of tracking from left to right. We will also listen to the Alphabet Song. We will focus on the letters and sounds of /m/, /s/, /a/, /p/ and /t/. We will blend these sounds and change beginning and ending sounds to make new words that rhyme. We will talk about fiction and non fiction and listen to an example of each. 

We will talk about sentence structure and will look for capital letters to start a sentence and endmarks to end our thoughts. 

High Frequency Words -  go, a, has, I, like, do, to, you, he, can

Math
We will review basic addition of numbers to 10. We will look at addition as taking two small groups and putting them together to make one big group. The children will practice writing and reading addition sentences using + and = signs. The children will learn the vocabulary words  addend (the numbers added together) and sum (the answer to an addition problem). We will use ten frame cards to model addition problems. Children will realize that problems can be related and that the order of the numbers does not matter - 3+2=5 or 2+3 = 5.

Religion
We will begin with Chapter 1 and talk about Creation. My friends will learn the definition of Bible and creation and we will look for examples of God's creation. We will talk about ways that we care for God's creation and will thank God for all of the people that help us to grow in God's love. Our number one rule this year is to BE KIND so we will always focus on ways we can show kindness to others.

Science
We will begin with Unit 1 and will be discussing our five senses and how we use each of our senses to learn more about the world around us. We will descibe objects using each of our senses. We will also talk about Science tools - rulers, scales, thermometers - and how we use them to leanr more about objects.

Scholastic News
We will talk about community helpers and how we can help in our home and school communities.