Dear River Families,

We had a busy week in Kindergarten as we continued studying the Native Americans, and we continued a STEM unit focusing on physics and engineering. The children worked in small groups and rotated stations with different tools and challenges. They were prompted to build a bridge, build a tall structure, build a roller coaster with 2 dips and a turn, build a car and build a house. One of the biggest challenges of this unit is learning how to work as a team and make decisions in a group.  We will continue this unit and have these materials available with different challenges through December.

Centers this week included making thankful cards for people around the school and for our families. The children worked hard on thankful books that they will take home this week!  We also learned more about the Northwest Native Americans with a presentation from Ms. Patti. We have several artifacts and books about different tribes and customs that our students will explore for the next few weeks.  This fits in nicely with our discussion of the fundamental needs of man and identifying what we are thankful for. They are learning that the homes, food and clothing were different for the Native Tribes, depending on where they lived – the weather, the natural surroundings and food. But that all humans have the same needs. 

We read the book Some Friends to Feed this week and discussed community. Each child will have a hand in making Stone Soup a fantastic activity again this year.  The River children will help cutting the vegetables for our soup.

In Math this week we continued working on filling in the missing numbers in patterns. We also began a new unit identifying and naming 3-dimensional objects. In Literacy we introduced vowels and presented this to the children as, “a e i o u and sometimes y.” We also learned more about the, “magic e” and how it can be a silent letter added at the end of a word to make the vowel say its name.

For the week of November 25, Treehouse will be open Monday – Wednesday, but Kindergarten will be on academic break. Treehouse will be closed Thursday the 28th and Friday the 29th.

Sincerely,

Ms. Lauren and Ms. Charlotte

Vowels- a e i o u and sometimes y   <- example- “baby”

Magic e- it can be a silent letter added at the end of a word to make the vowel say its name ie. The magic e turns can to cane, bled/bleed, pin/pine, hug/huge