Mrs. Miller & Mrs. O'Toole's Kindergarten Class

We are so happy to be your child's teacher. This kindergarten year will be a year of new beginnings, a year filled with large and small accomplishments, a year of trying new things and making new friends. Kindergarten is an important year in your child's education. It sets the foundation for future years.We are honored to be on this very memorable and special journey with you and your child! We will be updating this website weekly with our K1 Newsletter, class photos, important dates and information.

We look forward to working with you this year! 

Important Dates:

September 7 - No School Labor Day

September 18 - Fall Picnic

October 12 - Teacher workday - no school for students

October 30 - Halloween celebration - Minimum day for K all students meet 8:15-11:45

Hello Families!   

This week in social emotional learning we focused on the concept of “thinking with your eyes.” This concept helps children understand there is a purpose for observing others and the environment. “Our eyes are like arrows”, they point to what we are looking at, which suggests what we or others are thinking about. “Thinking with our eyes” is something that we will continue to work on as a group. Ms. G also came in and did a second lesson on zones of regulation. Please see her handout in your child’s Friday bag.

Mrs. G continued talking about zones of regulation with the class this week. The zones of regulation is a framework that groups human feelings, energy levels, and alertness states into four distinct, color-coded zones to help children build self-awareness and emotional control. The zones of regulation teaches that all zones are natural and okay, and no emotion is inherently "bad". 

In math we continued to work with; identifying shapes by their attributes, naming shapes and drawing shapes. We had a fun math talk about shapes and how they are similar and different. The children got lots of opportunities to talk about their thoughts. I am proud of the class. They are learning how to give each other time to think and they are beginning to understand the importance of listening to others' ideas and discovering different ways to solve a problem.

We also worked on identifying equivalent groups of subitizable quantities that are represented in different ways. Seeing the same number of images in a variety of arrangements promotes conceptual understanding of cardinality, supports early number recognition, and discourages pattern memorization.

We are doing shared writing each week. Shared writing is a collaborative technique teachers use to help children develop ways to begin to write or to improve their writing. Shared writing gives children a model of how the writing process works. Some mechanics of writing we are beginning to learn about include; leaving spaces between words, understanding punctuation and listening to the beginning sounds of words.

In Bridge to Reading we focussed on the sounds /m/, /s/ and /a/. We are also working on hearing words that rhyme and matching pictures that rhyme, listening for beginning and ending sounds in a word, and creating/blending new words that are made from two words. We worked on correctly writing these letters in both capital and lowercase. The letters “s” and “a” this week were particularly tricky for many students. Please see this week’s Bridge to Reading Parent handout to practice these letters at home.

We continued to work on our Brown Bear book. The children can’t wait each day to work on the next character’s page in their book. We also practiced our early literacy skills: reading and tracking left to right, tapping or pointing one time under each word as we read while working on our first class reader, a mini version of Brown Bear, Brown Bear. Each child has their own book bin to keep their readers in. When they finish their work they are invited to read their books in their book bins!

Thanks for all the support at home. Please continue to read with your child every evening and practice their letter and sound fluency page daily too.

Have a wonderful three day weekend! - Kathy & Stephanie