First of October

Picture Day! The Relatives Came!

   This is a reminder that tomorrow is our school picture day. Our photos will be taken tomorrow morning. All orders for photo packages must be turned in at that time. I doubt the company will accept late orders since their headquarters is not here in N.C. If you want your child to wear something spiffy for the photo and then change into their regular school clothing afterwards, just let me know in the morning. Thank you!

   Also, this Friday at 1:00 is our “Relatives Came” event. Please, come prepared with a favorite picture book to read to a small group of children including your child. If you would also like to provide a small snack for the children in your group that is fine. Some people go the WAY extra mile and try to connect the snack to the story. For example, on your child’s screening day we read them a story about a dog named Spot and then gave the children “Scooby Snack” graham crackers that are shaped like dog treats. You do not have to do that. Fruit snacks, graham crackers, Goldfish crackers, and popcorn are usually safe snacks even for our children with food allergies. See you Friday!

IB Learner Profile

Over the past two weeks, our class has been talking about what it means to be an IB learner. There are certain traits that we try to instill in each child here at Joyner that will make them life-long learners and achievers. We refer to this list of traits as the IB Learner Profile. We expect our students to be: Inquirers, Thinkers, Knowledgeable, Communicators, Principled, Open-Minded, Caring, Risk-Takers, Balanced, and Reflective. Each day I have read a book that illustrates one of these traits. After reading the children then think about ways that they can exhibit these traits either at school or at home. I ask them to draw a picture of themselves and tell me how they would be these things. I have been extremely impressed with the amount of thought that the children have put into their drawings and their sentences. Once we have finished all 10 traits on Monday, I will display the children’s work in the hallway. Please, look for their IB Learner Profiles soon.

Math Skills and Centers

      We have been working diligently these past few weeks on number sense, one-to-one correspondence, numeral recognition, and the concepts of “less”, “more”, and “equal”. We have started with amounts from 0 to 10, but we will gradually increase that amount over time. It is important to start with lower amounts to build foundational skills, even for children who have been accurately counting to ten for quite some time.

     Number sense is about having a basic understanding of what numbers are and how they work. This goes beyond rote counting or saying the words “one, two, three…ten” in the correct sequence. When you hear the word “number” you should think of an amount. Developing this skill means a kindergartner can look at two numbers like 4 and 7 and quickly be able to tell someone which of the amounts would be more or less. It also means that your child is primarily working with sets of objects and not forced to magically do everything in his/her head.

     One-to-one correspondence refers to a child’s ability to accurately and consistently count to a particular number. For instance, if I ask children to show me 17 plastic cubes, some children may say the right words in the correct order but not match their counting of objects to the words they are saying. The child may actually make a group of 20 cubes or 15 cubes instead. We start with smaller amounts to make sure children have one-to-one correspondence strategies in place before we tackle larger amounts.

     Numeral recognition is the ability to see the symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 and know what they are called. This is not the same thing as number sense. For example, numeral recognition means that later on they know that twelve is written using the numeral “1” followed by the numeral “2”. Number sense means the child understands that “12” and “twelve” are the same thing and that a set of twelve objects would be made of a group of ten and two more. While it may seem that we are working with simple ideas, your child is actually dealing with some very abstract concepts.

     On a related note, we typically work in math centers from 11:00 – 12:00 each day. Then, we clean up; go to the bathroom; wash hands; and then, go to lunch at 12:15. If you would be willing to volunteer during this time, be on the look out for a sign-up sheet in Monday’s O.T.I.S. folder. Don’t worry. Most of the volunteering requires you to play a game with a group of 2-5 children. Thank you!

Field Trip to Ganyard Hill Farm

   I also just wanted to thank all of the parents who have signed and returned their permission form, and those who have paid for their child to go. We do have some children in our class who cannot afford to go so if you would be willing to donate an extra $15 for another child to go, I would greatly appreciate it! You can simply put it in an envelope in your child’s O.T.I.S. folder marked “Field Trip Donation”. 

   I would also like to thank the parents and grandparents who have graciously agreed to chaperone our trip on Thursday, October 16. I will send this information home to chaperones the day before the trip, but for those of you who would rather not try to keep up with an incredibly slow school bus on busy Raleigh streets and short stoplights, you can check out driving directions (and what the farm is like) at www.pumpkincountry.com. If you have any questions about being a chaperone or the trip, feel free to contact me.

Strep Alert!

   Well, it is a hazard of a new school year - we all get introduced to new germs. Unfortunately, strep has already made an appearance in our room. I had it over the weekend. I know of two students who have had it in the past five days, and two more children are out today. I think I know why.

   Ms. West and I will do our best at school to encourage hand washing and hand sanitizer use. We will also talk about healthy habits that the children should try (for example, covering a cough with an elbow, disposing of tissues, etc.)

   For you as parents I would just say to take your child seriously if he/she complains of not feeling well. Strep can start of with very mild symptoms (a slight sore throat, a headache, or a low grade fever), but it can progress very quickly. If you have any suspicion that your child may have strep, please take your child to the doctor immediately. The sooner a child starts on an antibiotic, the sooner he/she will recover and be able to come back to school. Thank you!

Beginning of the Year!

   Hello! Welcome to Mr. Del’s Kindergarten blog!

   I am very excited about the year ahead of us. We have gotten off to a great start so far. I will use this blog to keep you updated on curriculum, JYJ happenings, and class events. 

   Ms. West will also be sending me photos of your children in action around the school to post. I will re-check everyone’s photo permission forms before I post any child photos on here, but if you have any concerns please let me know.

   If you need to get in touch with me for any reason feel free to email me tlancaster@wcpss.net or call the JYJ front office number (919) 856-7650 and leave a message. I will get back in touch with you just as soon as I can. Thank you!

Unit: “This Is the Way

We Go To School”

PYP Transdisciplinary Theme --

How We Organize Ourselves

Central Idea: Cooperation (working together) is a necessary part of our classroom community, and the students (citizens) of this class must establish and follow rules to maintain cooperation.

   For the first several weeks of school we explore ideas related to citizenship and why we need rules. Despite their frustration when they don’t get their way, children actually want and need rules. Children like a structure that allows them to learn, to make choices, and to play, but that one that also keeps them safe and allows everyone to share materials.

   During the last few days we have been developing “shared agreements” about how different parts of our day should look. Look at the tab at the top of the page entitled “The JYJ Way” for the agreements we have developed so far. These statements are actually generated by the children. I have been pleasantly surprised at some of the things that they have suggested. They have probably heard many of these “rules” from you, their parents, and from their pre-school teachers.

   We will later talk about how following rules make us good “citizens”. We will also explore what our classroom would be like WITHOUT rules.

   Next week, your child will bring home an activity to finish with you. Together, you will list some rules you have for them at home. Your child should try to think about WHY those rules are necessary (such as  to be safe, to keep the house clean, to have a healthy body, etc.). Then, you will have to talk about some rules that you have to follow as adults. They can be things as simple as traffic laws, work procedures, or how you behave in line at the grocery store. You will explain why adults have to follow rules, too.

We will try to consistently use the word “citizen” to describe ourselves as members of a community like a class, a school, or a country. While we as adults know that citizenship involves a great deal more, this is the beginning of your child’s understanding of what the concept of “citizenship” means.

Deadlines

   I realize that schools and teachers ask a lot of parents, particularly at the beginning of the school year. I try to make things as easy as I can.

   Please, send in your child’s Personality Train by Friday, October 3. We want every child to have an opportunity to share their poster in class before we hang them in the hall. The children love to look at each other’s posters, and your child may want to show you friends’ posters if you walk them into the school in the mornings.

   I also ask that you send in T-shirt money by October 3. The cost is $10. That will give us enough time to make sure every child has a t-shirt before our first field trip. If you are willing to donate an extra $10 for a child who otherwise many not be able to pay for their shirt, I would greatly appreciate it. You can just make a note of your intention to do that when you send in the money for your own child.

End of the Year Festivities!

Kindergarten BEACH DAY!  The Kindergarten teachers will set up WET and WILD beach activities on the front lawn for two days.  3 classes will have Beach Day on one day and 2 Kindergarten classes & the Pre-K class will have Beach Day the next day.  Our class is scheduled for Wednesday, June 11.  (This is the CORRECT date for our class!!)  This is one of our biggest events in Kindergarten & we need many hands to make this a safe and FUN morning!!! 

Volunteers- Beach day Volunteers are needed from 8:30 until 11:00.  Anyone can help:  moms, dads, grandparents, older/responsible siblings.  But we ask that younger siblings stay at home so our volunteers can focus their attention on the Kindergarteners.

End Of the Year Supplies-I have posted the link for the specific supplies for many of the end of year activities we have planned for the class.  In addition to these items, we are asking that every child send in $5.00 so that the class may enjoy a snow cone from the Kona ice truck and a pizza lunch on Beach Day. 

We are also collecting some supplies for Kindergarten's Beach Day.  These will be used by all the K classes, whereas the linked supply list is only for our class' activities.  Some of these materials will be used on other days prior to Beach Day.

If you are able to bring one of the items listed below, no need to sign up- just send it to school by May 30th.  Thanks!

Kindergarten Beach Day supplies needed:  rub-on tattoos, gallon size containers of bubbles, big bubble wands, sidewalk chalk, empty & rinsed out gallon milk jugs, or large empty dish detergent bottles

Other Upcoming Events Include:

Friday, June 6th -- Ice Cream Day  From 1:15 - 1:30 the kids will enjoy ice cream sundaes with their friends. 

Monday, June 9th -- Friendship Day  We will spend the morning celebrating the friendships we have made this year. We will have friendship centers throughout the day, and then we will take our lunches over to Kiwanis park to have a class picnic. 

Tuesday, June 10th -- Ocean Animal Day  The children will have some fun ocean themed centers in our class that day. 

Wednesday, June 11th -- Beach Day  As described above.

Thursday, June 12th -- Game Day and the Last Day of Kindergarten!  The children can bring in their favorite board games to play with their friends. (Please, label them with your child's name on them.) We will clean up, pack up, and say our goodbyes. : (

Curriculum Updates and Important Dates for May/June

JY Joyner Field Day

Friday, May 23

8:30 – 10:30 K-2

Kiwanis Park

Things to remember…..

*sunscreen should be put on at home BEFORE coming to school

*wear tennis shoes (no flip flops)

*wear tie-dyed Kindergarten shirt

*bring a change of clothing (including socks, underwear and shoes)

*bagged lunch (we will be eating in the classroom that day)

Animal Report

Animal reports are due next Friday, May 23.  We encourage you to go to pebblego.com to retrieve information.  This is a great website – very age appropriate and easy for the kids to use! 

Username:  joyner

Password:  book

Animal Parade:  On Wednesday, May 28^th, the Kindergarten students will be having their Animal Parade.  Each student will carry or wear their animal project and we will parade through the halls to show off everyone’s hard work.   Our parade will begin around 8:45.  I hope you can join us! 

Lunch Coverage:  Because of Field Day next week, we WON’T be having K lunch coverage, May 23.   We did want to extend our sincerest thanks to parents who have taken the time to cover lunch so that teachers and teaching assistants can have a duty-free lunch once a month.  We are so grateful!  Thank you!

Reading:  We continue to work on building our sight word (target words) vocabulary.  Please continue working with your child at home to recognize these words in their reading and to work toward conventional spelling of these words in their writing.  During Daily 5, we are building our foundation of various reading skills.  We’ve learned that it’s OK to skip a word we don’t know, to read to the end of the sentence and then go back and try and make a guess.  We’re learning the difference between a good guess and a not so good guess.  A good guess needs to make sense, sound right in the sentence and look right (do those letters make the sounds I am saying?)  As we build strategic readers, we are working toward independently moving between difference strategies to solve for unknown words.  Sounding out a word is a good strategy, but it is important to remember that it is not the only strategy and it is not always the best strategy.  By asking the questions:  Does it make sense?  Does it sound right?  Does it look right?, we are helping children to not only build their reading strategies, but it ultimately strengthens their comprehension of the text. 

Writing: In Daily 5, we are thinking about our own writing and what specifically make us a better writer.  We are thinking specifically about the following things that good writers do when they write:

1.          Using finger space between words

2.         Putting a period at the end of a sentence.

3.          Using target words correctly.

4.        Using a beginning, middle and end to our stories.

5.         Writing more than one thought (sentence) about a topic.

As we write in Daily 5, the children are specifically targeting one goal for their writing that day and making certain that we are working toward achieving that goal! 

Math:  We continue to work on addition and subtraction.  Our subtraction and addition problems go to 20.  We are beginning to work on word problems and having to decide whether we use addition or whether we use subtraction to solve the problem.  We try to think…”are we getting more?  …. Are we getting less?”

We begin our study of measurement.  We are using non-standard units of measurement to measure objects.  What would happen if I measured two objects with the same thing?  What would happen if I measure the same object, but with two different measurement units?

We are also studying different types of graphs! 

***IMPORTANT***

Kindergarten plans a beach day at the end of the school year.

Please note the following dates:

Tuesday, June 10

      Forbes

      Thompson

      Piner

Wednesday, June 11

      Del

      Wilkinson

      PreK

(We will doing a specific blog post later in the week to explain all the volunteer opportunities and supplies needed! )  IT’S a BLAST!!!!

Dates to Remember:

Saturday, May 17-Letterland Day-Wake County Schools will be hosting a Letterland Day at Pullen Park.  Bring your Kindergartener out to have fun with all the Letterlanders!  

 Friday, May 23-Field Day-a FUN day at Kiwanis Park! Mr. Poyer will need donations & parent help (Animal Project Due)

Monday, May 26-Memorial Day-School Closed

Wednesday, May 28-Animal Parade

Friday, June 6-Ice Cream Day in K!  …details to come
Monday, June 9 - Friendship Day ....details to come

Tuesday, June 10-Beach Day in K!  …details to come

Thursday, June 12-LAST DAY!!!

Ice Day Update

WAKE Up and Read Book Drive

   Don’t forget to send in your gently used books for JYJ’s WAKE Up and Read Book Drive.  Our school goal is to collect 2,000 books, but within a few days so far, we have collected over 350 books!   So scrounge around your bookshelves and send in those books that you no longer need and benefit another child within Wake County who does not have access to books.

 Kindergarten Spring Scavenger Hunt:   

   The date has not been set, but our class will be having a Spring Scavenger Hunt and we need your help!  I will attach a sign-up sheet to the blog.  We need filled plastic eggs, and this is the time to buy them. You can get any size. Just make sure there is enough blank space on them to write a letter or draw a shape. If you can help, please go to the sign up sheet and put your name beside the item.  We have a scavenger hunt for specific eggs – children will hunt for the eggs that have the following written on the outside of the egg with a sharpie:

S, P, R, I, N, G, a circle, a square, a triangle, a rectangle, a smiley face, and their initials. 

So each child will end up with 12 eggs!  So you can see we need LOTS of eggs!!!  The sign up sheet should explain how you can specifically prepare eggs.  Please DO NOT put chocolate or unwrapped jelly beans into the eggs.  Stickers, tattoos, life savers, individually wrapped bags of candy, trinkets, etc. are great to use!  If you sign up to help, please send in all eggs by APRIL 11.  THANK YOU!!!

 Curriculum Updates

Literacy: We are working on rhyming and word families. These two ideas don’t always go hand-in-hand, though. For instance, “glue” and “shoe” rhyme because they sound the same at the end, but they are not spelled with the same vowel combination to make the “oo” sound. Likewise, “cough” and “dough” are in the same word family, but they do not rhyme. For the most part, we will focus on word families that do rhyme. This skill allows children to decode and spell new words based on what they already know about other words. For example, if a child already knows the word “cat”, they can quickly see that if they just change the first letter, they can read and spell the words “hat”, “mat”, “bat”, and so on.

   In Letterland we are working on combinations of letters. We have already learned the “ck” and the “ng” combinations that come at the end of words. We have also worked on the diagraphs “ch”, “sh”, and “th” (which actually makes TWO sounds). We will soon also know about “ll” and “ff”, which come at the end of words.

Math:  We continue addition with number partners that make 10.  (1 + 9, 2 + 8, etc.) We are learning that addition word problems use specific language such as total, plus, more, altogether, and in all.  The children are practicing making and solving their own simple one-step word problems. We are also learning that you can add more than just two numbers to make a larger sum.

Science:  We are continuing our study of weather.  We have discussed the water cycle (evaporation, condensation, precipitation), and then we conducted experiments with water to observe the effects of evaporation. Next week, we will talk about different types of clouds and what they look like. We will also talk about how clouds can affect the temperature.

Dates to remember:

March 27 – Science Go Round

March 27 – End of Quarter

March 28 – Read – a – Thon for Wake Up and Read Book Drive (School-wide Pajama Day!)

March Curriculum Updates

Curriculum Updates

   We are working with children on a number of skills during the month of March. We are practicing how to identify characters and the setting in stories and being able to retell at least 3 things that happened in a story we have read. We are introducing the sh, ch, and th diagraphs in Letterland, including songs, activities, and stories to help us remember the sounds they make.

   We also ask that you work with your child at home on recognizing vowel sounds. They are quite tricky and take a LOT of practice to get right. In Letterland the short vowel sounds are made by Annie Apple, Eddy Elephant, Impy Ink, Oscar Orange, and Uppy Umbrella. The long vowel sounds are made by Mr. A (the Apron Man), Mr. E (the Easy Magic Man), Mr. I (the Ice Cream Man), Mr. O (the Old Man), and Mr. U (the Uniform Man).

   In math we are learning how to solve addition word problems. We are learning vocabulary associated with addition problems with words like “and”, “too”, “altogether”, and “in all”. We are starting with small numbers and not worrying too much about using the plus sign (+) and the equal sign (=), but those will come in time. Soon, we will solve problems using larger numbers with sums up to 20. We will also learn how to add using more than 2 addends. 

   We are also starting a new science unit on Weather to address the IB transdisciplinary theme of "How does the world work?" We will talk about the "ingredients" of weather (temperature, air, and water), seasonal weather changes, and weather processes. We will see how weather affects how people live around the world and why the weather can be so different from one place to the next. We will learn lots of vocabulary and try to become keen observers of our daily weather here in Raleigh.