Today is our 11th day of school, and we are off to a great start!

Tomorrow is the first day to send in the white folders and sight word rings.  Please practice the words in order, out of order, random order, etc.  When your child reads the word, I will punch a hole next to that word.  Then,  practice the words for the final read next week and if I am able to punch all of the words on the second week I will be able to add the next 10 words.  It’s a fun way to learn words that cannot be sounded out, they just have to recognize them and say them out loud without hesitation.  I know that the temptation is to encourage your child to try to sound out some of the words, but please don’t.  When we test the students, we stick to a standard set by the school district, a three second wait time is one of the standards.  Sight words or high frequency words are words that children see often in literature and they need to be memorized.

Please also send in decodable books that you have practiced at least 5 times at home.  Be sure you sign on the back of the decodable book, right next to your child’s name verifying that your child practiced these books with your supervision.  I know that these books seem way too easy with the little picture words and simple sight words, but at this time of the year we are teaching procedure.  As your child to track each word as they read.  Ask them a question about the story, and then ask them for evidence that helped them answer the question.  Right now the evidence can be something in a picture on one of the pages, or a word that gives them a clue.  Citing evidence to answer questions starts really early and it is a skill that your child will learn more about each year as their reading comprehension skills grow and their reading fluency increases.

Please send in class T shirt orders as soon as you can.  You might want to order one for yourself…last year one family ordered one for everyone in the family–5 shirts!  We wear these shirts on Fridays for spirit days, and on Field trips.  It really is an easy way to keep our groups together.

I hope that you are getting a lot of information about school from your child each day.  Ask them to sing the sound song, I was amazed at them today!

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More soon….

Mrs. O

Dear Parents,

Welcome to kindergarten!  We have a wonderful group of children in our class–lots of energy, smiles and fun!  Today is our 5th day of school and we have been working very hard.  I am going to keep this first entry brief and look forward to sharing a lot of information here on our blog.

It’g going to be an amazing year!

Thanks for your support at home,

Linda O’Neill

Today we were visited by some naughty but nice leprechauns.

They messed up our classroom, then ran outside and must have dropped their pots of gold, because there was gold everywhere!  The leprechauns also left us some clues about how to find some gold in our classroom–we are such great detectives, that it didn’t take long at all to track down the gold coins left by the naughty but nice little tricksters!  The kids had a great time searching for leprechauns and gold during their recess time today 🙂

Today was our day to “try out” the school cafeteria.  We had a lot of fun.  On the menu today:  pizza, refried bean dip with cheese & chips and tortellini  pasta.  Our little gourmet group were individuals, I don’t think a single one of them was influenced by what the classmates around them chose for their lunch.  They knew what they liked best  and they chose it!  We talked about how to open packages (raise your hand if you need help), how to walk through the lunchline and choose foods, how to make our trays (and us) fit at the table together, but most of all to eat and not talk.  At the beginning of  first grade, students have trouble getting all of their lunch eaten in the allotted cafeteria time.  We were there about 30 minutes today, which is how long the WHOLE lunch and recess period is.  If your child is a slow eater at the beginning of first grade, you might want to put off having them try school lunch for a little while as they get used to lunch & recess in first grade–unlike lunch from home, they can’t save their leftovers 🙂

Here is our bunch at lunch 🙂

Overall, they did a really good job of following directions and seemed to have fun doing it!

Special thanks to Mrs. Kennedy for coming along and helping us.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

This week has been a lot of fun celebrating the books of Dr. Seuss.  Today we celebrated by making Green Eggs & Ham in our class!  Each child cut up some ham and got to break an egg into the bowl, so much fun and so yucky touching those eggs!

Be sure to ask your child about today’s activity.   We were able to put our cooking under the projector, so that the children were able to watch as the green eggs & ham cooked.  So, while they were enjoying “Storytime with Mrs. Kennedy,” they were also watching, the “Cooking with Mrs. O’Neill Show.”

Before we go off on our 2 week Winter Break, I want to thank all of our families for their support this year.  Our kindergarten program would not be as fun and produce such eager learners without your support at home.

So please have a safe and fun Christmas, filled with the warmth and comfort of family and friends 🙂 And Happy New Year!! We will see you when school starts up again on Tuesday, January 5, 2016

This week we made Stone Soup in class.  Each child brought a vegetable to add to the soup, and on Wednesday we chopped the vegetables.  By adding the ‘magical stone’ to the soup, it turned out pretty good when we tasted it on Thursday.  I was hoping that some of our non-vegetable eating classmates would enjoy the soup, but, so sorry to report that there were no new vegetable lovers as the result of our soup.  But, we sure had fun!

Happy Thanksgiving …  I won’t see you tomorrow, as I am not at school on Fridays–so I will see you when we return on Monday, November 30.

In class today wrote our version of the Stone Soup recipe, and your child should have brought it home to show you.  In addition to the ingredients they listed, I added lots of chicken broth, and Italian seasoning to taste–just in case you are feeling adventurous 🙂

Happy Holiday!

Thank you Mrs. Chang for these cute pictures of our little people at the ‘patch!

Everyone had fun, the pumpkin patch is our very most fun trip all year!  Oh, and something new was added–there are now seatbelts on the buses!  Each child was safely buckled in by the teachers, which presented a bit of a challenge trying to leave on time…but, in the end there was plenty of time to enjoy all the fun things at Fog Willow.

Special thanks to all of the parents who were able to attend on this trip.  I sure like the way those red shirts stand out!

Today was National Walk to School Day, and even if our p.m. kinder kiddos just met us at the corner near the driveway–yes, that was walking to school for them!  We had our own little parade in, lots of fun 🙂  We posed for a picture on our playground after recess, too!