Hello Hello to everyone! Welcome families who are new to STBCA and welcome back to those who are returning. We are so glad to have you!
The first week of school is always exciting, but it feels even more exciting after being out of the building since March! I, personally, am very excited to be back in person. School isn’t the same when we’re not together!
During our first week of Kindergarten, students had a lot that they were being introduced to for the first time! A new room, new procedures, a new teacher, and new responsibilities! We took this week to focus on learning all of our new procedures: how to arrive and unpack for the day, how to walk in the hallways, how to take a bathroom break, how to get a drink of water from our water bottle, and how to pack up for the end of the day! We set up our classroom expectations and the consequences of what happens when we don’t follow the expectations. We also made a separate set of expectations for our Calm Down Kit! The Calm Down Kit is a set of drawers filled with materials that students can use when they are feeling very angry or sad and need some time to regroup alone before joining the whole class again. Students signed each set of rules, which is a promise to follow them.
We read lots of stories this week about going to school, including School’s First Day of School, Kindergarten Here I Come, Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes, How Do Dinosaurs Go to School?, The Pigeon Has to Go to School, and Grover Goes to School. Each one of these books has important themes like following the classroom rules, how to be a good friend to others, having confidence in ourselves, and respecting our school! On the first day we all made cards for Mr. Bob, the head of maintenance at STBCA, to say thank you for taking care of our school over the summer. We also read the story Mr. Wiggle’s Book to learn all about how to treat our books the right way!
Each day this week we focused on learning how to use one of our materials: pencils, markers, glue, and scissors! Every day we made an anchor chart stating the Do’s and Don’t’s for each material, followed by an activity. For our pencils, we practiced tracing. For markers, we colored in our names in bubble letters and then counted up how many letters we had in our name. Afterwards, we sorted ourselves by who had the most and the least amount of letters in their name. For glue, we practiced gluing pieces of tissue paper onto our name. This project is hanging up outside of our classroom! This was a follow up to a read aloud video we watched of the story Chrysanthemum, a story about a girl who is made fun of for her name but comes to love it anyways! For scissors, we colored in pictures and then cut these pictures up to make our own puzzles!
This groups has some great handwriting skills already, so they were ready to start working in their Handwriting books! We are practicing our posture when writing and writing straight lines vertically and horizontally. Students also had centers and free play each day where we are getting familiar with the toys and manipulatives in our room, and had a chance to start doing some alphabet activities!
We also learned about the different behavior management systems in our room — we have stones that we put in a jar when our whole class has a good day and when the jar is full we will get a classroom prize! Individually students will receive tickets for good behavior or for going above and beyond expectations, and can turn in their tickets for prizes like having bubbles at recess and having lunch with the teacher! Starting next week, each student will have a job to do in the classroom. They will have this job for a week and then they will rotate the following week. They are all so excited about this!
In your folders this weekend you will receive the September homework challenges! Remember, these are optional but I very much suggest doing them at home in order to practice things that we are working on in class. Next week we will start our Reading, Math, Social Studies and Science curriculums. I also will be reaching out to call everyone to let them about how students are doing academically. Feel free to email me with any questions and I hope you all enjoy your weekend!
Love,
Ms. V 🙂