When Santa Turned Green

One of our books of the month during December from 2 years ago, was a book called When Santa Turned Green. This book teaches students the importnace of keeping our environment "healthy"  by helping to control global warming. Global warming is a difficult topic for little ones to grasp, but this book puts it in kid-friendly terms to help them understand that if we don't take care of our Earth by recycling, reusing, and not polluting, then our Earth won't be able to last for a long time and even worse, Santa's North Pole will melt! We showed our friends a 6 minute video clip about global warmning and how it is affecting the glaciers in Alaska. We stopped the video to discuss what things like global warming meant. We wanted each friend to understand the impact that each person has on our planet. The students had a chance to finish our prompt in their Reader's AResponse journals I can help global warming by....

Ask them what they are going to do help keep Santa's house from melting!

Reading Strategies

As our students are beginning to comprehend books better and understand the story elements, we are moving into traditional reading with them. We have to start very basic, then build and build and build, so that they get the time to practice a new strategy and master it before moving on to a new one. So what are reading strategies? Reading strategies are like tools in a tool box. Each one is made to help with a particular job or skill. Reading strategies are the "tools" our friends pull out of their "tool box" when they get stuck reading. These are the reading strategies we've taught so far:

1. Look at the picture
2. Get your mouth ready
3. Ask yourself, does that make sense?
4. Point to the words

Looking at the picture is a strategy that we started the first week of school. The students have been telling or "reading" books by looking at the pictures and telling what is happening in the pictures. When we move into traditional reading, that strategy stays the same. They still will need to look at the picture before reading to get an idea of what words they might see on that page. From their, we teach them to get their mouth ready. When they use this strategy, their mouth is forming the sound the first letter in a word will make. They wait for a second before saying the sound, then look at the picture to guess what the word might be. This is where the third strategy comes in, does it make sense. If the first letter in a word they see is S, they might start thinking of words that begin with S. They then need to go back and look at the picture since they know the beginning sound, and think about what word matches the picture and makes sense. Pointing to the right word is very important. They need to use all the above strategies to be able to point to the correct word.

Ask your student to show you their reading strategies from their "tool box"! This is a GREAT thing to do with their leveled book in their book-in-a-bag every night.

Helpful Homework

Kindergarten Homework is a great time for parents to get a glimpse into their child's classwork. Skills that are included in your child's homework have been covered and practiced daily in class. For example, each day in Skills Block, we practice counting the number of syllables in the Star Student's name.



Homework is not meant to overload your child with work. They spend all day exercising their brains, so we do not want homework to be overwhelming. Homework is meant to be a fun time for you to share with your child. If the activities are challenging for your child, only select one other activity to do each night along with reading their Book-in-a-Bag. Homework should not take more than 20 minutes each night.



If you are finding that the homework is not challenging enough for your child, feel free to add other enrichment activities. Doing a page or two from a Kindergarten workbook would be great practice if your child is willing and able. However, also we encourage you to try to add academic practice into your everyday routines. If you are cooking, ask your child to help you think of the steps to making the recipe. If you are riding to soccer practice, ask your child to look for a certain letter or snap word as you drive. Every day moments can easily be turned into teaching moments for you and you child.

Kindergarten Kids

Literacy Stations

We started a very fun and exctiting new activity in our classroom this week! We began visiting literacy stations. Each day, small groups of students will visit a different reading station, which allows them to practice the skills learned during Readers Workshop. At this point in the year, most of our literacy stations are focused around retelling. Students are encouraged to retell the books they read to their neighboors or groups. Their retellings should include such story elements as the characters and setting, as well as events from the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Educational research supports retelling as a stepping stone towards conventional reading, and each of our students will be testing on their retelling skills within the next couple of weeks.

Here are some pictures from our first week of literacy stations:
Reading Star Books


Reader's Theater


Reading on Bean Bags


Partner Reading


Listening to books on tape

Sowing the Seeds of Independence

 We're SO sorry to keep you waiting for a Blog post, but we were experiencing some technical difficulties with our Blog. We are full swing into our rituals and routines and everyone is adjusting wonderfully to our classroom life. We have been very busy understanding where things go, what to do and when to do it, and we are learning, learning, learning. It's our job to help guide the students to become independent, self-directed learners and that's what we are doing at this time. Here are some tips for helping your student become and independent Kindergartener:
1. Drop them off in the car loop and let them walk inside.
2. Create a good-bye routine with your student, discuss it with them, and stick to it. (example: Tell them to have a great day, 1 hug, 1 kiss, and then walk away)
3. Let them carry their backpacks so they have ownership of it.

Stay tuned for an upcoming post on Reader's and Writer's Workshop later in the week!


P.S. Don't forget to check the blue Communication folder on a daily basis.

A Farm-tastic Year!

Hello new Kindergarteners! We are getting very excited for our year to start! We are busy getting everything ready to learn and play this year. Make sure that you are reading a lot of books before school starts... and spend lots of time playing, too!

We can't wait to see all of you at Orientation on August 20th at 8am!

Donor's Choose

Have you ever wondered what you could do for your child's teacher to make their classroom just that much better? If so, check out the amazing organization called DonorsChoose.org. DonorsChoose.org is a website that provides teachers with a place to write grants for their classrooms. Teachers can go "shopping" at approved stores and create a wish list for a project in for their classroom. Grants can range from small projects, such as more books for a classroom library, to large projects, such as field trips.

Once projects are approved and posted, donors (everyone from individuals to companies) can look through them to choose just the right project to support. Donors can contribute any amount towards any project that they like. You can sort by types of projects, locations of schools, grade level of classrooms... just about anything! If you or someone you know is thinking about making a charitable donation, this is a great way to go! All donations are tax deductable and go directly to helping individual classrooms. Just this week alone, 2,188 donors funded 557 projects that reached 17,589 students!

If you are interested in checking out this site, here is a link to the project that Mrs. Thomas and I have posted (http://www.donorschoose.org/sambito). We are hoping to have our project fully funded by the start of next school year, and we would love your help with spreading the word!

Arts Extravaganza Week

This week Chets Creek is celebrating the Arts! Our hallways have been transformed into an art gallery with our students' visual art from throughout the year, and each morning we are treated to an assembly featuring different types of performing arts.

On Monday, the Sugar and Spice Puppetry group performed for us. We danced and laughed as were entertained by the puppets and magician. Perhaps we will have some little magicians and puppeteers in our room.

Tuesday brought us members of the percussion section of the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra! We learned all about percussion instruments and rhythm. Check out these videos from their performance:

Persuasive Writing

We are beginning a new unit in writing this week! We will begin learning about Persuasive Writing. Our unit is based on writing persuasive letters to friends and family, so our first step is teaching our students how to writing letters. Today we began by choosing our favorite book by Eric Carle and telling why it is our favorite in the body of our letter. Tomorrow we will learn about adding things to our letter such as the date, greeting, salutation, and signature.

As our unit progresses, we will begin using our letters to convince people of our idea. For example, we may be writing a letter to our parents asking for a new toy and explaining why we think that we deserve the toy. We will be stressing making our request and including detailed support in order to convince our reader.

The book I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff is great for show young learners what we mean by persuasive writing. The book is about a boy who writes letters back and forth to his mother trying to convince her to let him have an iguana. We hope that this is the direction that our students' writing will be headed during this unit! So, get ready, I hear the postman heading in your direction!