Newsletter and pictures for October 17th, 2008

Dear Families,
How many of you can say that you like spiders? The children have discovered the art of surveying each other to find out their likes and dislikes and are coming up with very creative questions each day. After watching them create their own survey sheets for several days, I created one that they can all use: but they have to write in their own question and the answer choices in order to be able to use it. Mrs. Groote and I are helping those students who need assistance writing their questions and many words have been added to our word wall because of it. Today’s popular question was “Do you have a Wii?” There have also been questions about favorite color, food, shapes, animals, and on and on!
You should have seen the children’s faces light up when I told them we would be learning about spiders this week! We started our theme with a Big Book titled, I Love Spiders. Monday, we took our usual picture walk through the story. Tuesday, the children echo read the story and Wednesday, we predicted how many times we would read the word “spider” in the story and then we highlighted it each time we found it. This will be a new task that goes into our Big Book Work Station. Thursday, we made a web all about Spiders and things that we knew about them and had learned about them. Friday, we added to the web and completed our KWL chart.
Our KWL chart was created with the students thoughts. The “K” stands for “what we know”, the “W” for “what we want to know”, and the “L”, “what we learned”. We spent some time on Monday filling in the KW parts of the chart. The children knew many things about spiders and so we made a long list of those. They also had some wonderful things they wanted to know about spiders, so I took that information and used it to help me choose the books I would read aloud and the concepts we would explore about spiders. Friday, we re-visited the chart and looked at the “L” column and answered many of the questions from the “W” column. The chart is hanging in the hallway outside of our classroom.
We dove deep into patterning this week. Wednesday, we used candy corn to help get us excited about patterning. The children all did a wonderful job and Thursday, we continued to make more patterns with various materials. We used fall shaped foam pieces, spider and bat rings, fall shaped math manipulatives, and fall themed stamps and patterning paper. I took pictures of many of the patterns and posted some of them on my blog (the last one listed below).
We also created a new Predictable Chart this week, simply called, “Spiders...”. The children came up with some amazing ways to end this sentence! You can see a picture of that on our classroom blog. Friday, we used the sentences to make a class book. I will have all of our class books out for you to look at during our conference times in two weeks.
I sent home conference confirmation sheets Monday, so if you need to make a change please let me know. Please note that on Tuesday the 28th, there is a 1/2 day of school. If you child will be getting home a different way that day, please let me know that as well. There is NO KINDERGARTEN on Wednesday the 29th or Thursday the 30th, so please make a note of that. Grades 1-5 will have 1/2 days even though we are not in school.
Friday, October 31st, is a holiday that is celebrated by some, but not all of our students. Please do not send your child to school wearing a costume. We will not be having a party that day, but instead have chosen to use that day for a Science Stretch Day where we will get together with the 3 other Kindergarten classes for a day full of science activities!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Kristen Poindexter
http://www.poindexterpress.blogspot.com
http://www.kpoindexter.wordpress.com