Thanks for Great Conferences and Starting our Building Unit This Week

Amazing Families,

Thank you for the 100% participation in parent teacher conferences over the last two days. I was so happy to celebrate all the learning that has happened this year and look forward to making sure that our class is ready for kindergarten.  

We wrapped up our Reduce, Reuse and Recycle unit last week and are ready to turn our focus to our new theme, Buildings! We will study buildings in our neighborhood and in the world. Some of this information was included in an attachment from our Principal, Shuba in a Deets last week, but I'd like to put the call out again:   To get the study started, we are gathering pictures of all sorts of buildings. We could really use your help! We welcome pictures from any source, such as newspapers or magazines, postcards, printouts from the Internet, and your family's photo collection. It would be wonderful if you could include pictures of buildings in other parts of the world, too. 

As we study buildings, we will learn concepts and skills in science social studies, literacy, math, the arts, and technology. We will also be using thinking skills to investigate, ask questions, solve problems, make predictions, and test our ideas. 

In class this week:

Skip will be:

Using blocks to measure children, exploring scale by comparing ourselves to trees on the grounds of buildings, comparing numbers of objects using Ten Frames, conducting a discussion and shared writing about the different parts of buildings, and analyzing text to "find the missing letter sound". 

Claudine will be assembling an illustrated word wall of many types of buildings to inform our writing about buildings, making towers with blocks, and making observational drawings of buildings. 

We will also allign ourselves with Kindergarten by using the Orton-Gillingham hand writing worksheets that feature a simplified drawing of house (that ties perfectly into our new unit!) on the left hand side of lined paper to aid in children's letter formation. For example, capital letters would be written starting at the "roof line" and extend down to the foundation of the house. A lower case "g" would start at the "door line" and go down to the "basement".

I'd like to close out this letter by asking for volunteers to accompany our class on a neighborhood walk to study some of the houses and buildings in the neighborhood around the school this Friday, March 8. We will be starting our walk at 9:20 and will be documenting our observations with drawings for approximately 20 minutes. 

Thank you,

Skip and Claudine