Friday

Today was a fun day with our visiting Button Quail. The class had time to sit and watch them at centers. The eggs they hatched from are as small as your thumb nail, and the birds are an inch to an inch and half small, as little baby birds. They peep all day long. It is amazing what we learn by observation. They got to see how they drink, the different colors and patterns of feathers they have, and many other things. Ask your child about them. They got to sit and observe as a center rotation.

We wrote; "I like learning about ___________ most because ___________. They chose from butterflies, frogs, chicks, or Button Quail. We discussed how chicks and Button Quail are different. Another Kindergarten class hatched chicks a week ago. They were able to compare them.

We continued to learn about Vv and Zz sounds today; and we practiced writing High Frequency words. Where and Come were the High Frequency words for this week.

Mothers Day is coming, and we were talking about how special moms are to us. We began making our gifts today; shh, don't let us tell you. Sincerely, Deena Bartsch

Thursday

Thursday- Today was a great day! The class is adjusting very well, and I am also adjusting well. I am enjoying you children so much! Today we read a big book called "On The Move". It is about different kinds of transportation. We talked a little about where some of the kids have gone and how they got there.
I am amazed at how well they are writing words by decoding the sounds they make. We wrote zig, zag, vest, jazz and fizz.
We are having visitors tomorrow. I am bringing in baby Button Quail that my husband and I hatched. They hatched on Easter. We have been talking about the life cycles of butterflies, frogs, and now birds. Sincerely, Deena Bartsch

Late Wednesday

We apologize for not getting on here yet this week. I did try once on Tuesday and got a strange message about malware so I shut it down quickly and wrote to Mrs. Hansen. She couldn't find anything wrong and it looks like it's working well tonight.
So I'll start a short description of the start of our week. I only get 1/2 of a day with them this week as I went on a short trip with my parents.
Tuesday morning we started the unit on transportation around the world and practiced everything we could about the letters V and Z. One of the things we are talking about is our zipcode. Please help your child learn his/her address and zipcode. Since it's "z: week we are trying to use the word 'zero' instead of the letter '0' when we talk about number 0. Our friend, Zero the Hero, holds the place when there aren't any straws in our days we have been at school calendar.
The Big Book "On the Move" was bright, colorful and informative. We also heard amazing things about our star student, Orion including that he was named after a constellation! In Math we are working on the concept of one fewer and two fewer. You probably saw a worksheet with more than on one side and fewer than on the other. Playing number game with your child will reinforce these two valuable concepts.
Tuesday afternoon there was also an assembly on an upcoming blood drive. We are hosting a United Services Blood Drive next Tuesday afternoon from 2-6pm. Our school attended a brief assembly about this, please ask your child to share what they learned and look for postcards to be coming home if you wish to donate blood. The school that gets the most donations earns $500.00 for the school!
Mrs. Bartsch and I are getting things ready for Mother's Day and our visit to the Farm in May. A new calendar and lunch menu will come home tomorrow, so check those Thursday folders! Mrs. Bartsch has an exciting surprise in Science for Friday, so be sure to ask your child what was new in school that day!
I haven't had time to teach Mrs. Bartsch about this blog, but hope to soon. Have a nice end of April, I hear we are going to get those April Showers that I hope bring lots of May flowers!

Sincerely, Mrs. Clapper

WOW What a fast Early Out Day!

We fit so much into our short 3 1/2 hours together and ended the day with a fast 3 laps around the school as part of the week of fundraising for Juvenile Diabetes and March of Dimes. Today we started the day with a fun Easter story, and then learned about Interrupting Politely in a Second Step lesson. Then we had a long recess and let our butterflies go. It was cool enough that they hung around on our hands and each child that wanted to hold one got to. The students were very quiet and calm and enjoyed a close up look at our butterflies before we set them free.

When we came in from recess, we had treats for earning the 300 compliments, and had a surprise visit from Eli's guinea pig because his Mom had brought it to his older brother's class. We took a quick peek and then headed to Library. Mrs. Bartsch met with me during library, so she went to pick them up and bring them back to the room! She is such a cheerful teacher, we love having her! Then it was time to get our backpacks, coats and our plants to take home. Many of the bean seeds did not grow. I apologize if it was because we had two different bags of soil and the last ones planted seem to do better than the first ones.

The final things we did was to Drop everything to Walk around the school. It was a very fast pace because the whole school participated. We were very glad Mrs. Treglown our librarian was walking so that she could take the front of our class and I could try to corral them all together. I was glad each child said "Happy Easter" to Mrs. Clapper so I knew that they got to their ride home! Whew! Now I need to head to Teacher meetings and then to the airport to get my daughter and granddaughter!

Next week we will have both Vv and Zz for Show and Tells. Tuesday students told me they would try hard to remember their two things of come up with something to say about V and Z words!
Have a nice vacation!
Sincerely, Carol Clapper

300 Compliment Day

We did it! We got to 300 compliments today. So we got to watch the Butterfly Magic School Bus video AND have centers too!
Tomorrow I will bring cake and milk to finish the celebration!

We did a fun math sheet to practice our numbers and I see less and less reversals everytime we write the numbers. 21 and 12 still cause a little problem but we are improving!

Q show and tell was AWESOME! We sat around a quilt and had such creative ideas. I can't even just pick one or two to tell you about. Have your child tell you about some of his/her favorites.

Tomorrow is Library Day and Early out Day! We are also walking for our theme fundraising day at 11:40. Come join us if you want. We will have our backpacks loaded and after walking around at least once with your child you can take them whenever you want. I will make sure bus students and day care get to their appropriate places at the right time!

We read one of my favorite Little Golden Books called the Egg Book. See if your child knows how the bunny and the duckling became friends!

Have a nice evening!
Sincerely, Carol Clapper

1st of 2 Earth Day Celebrations

Today we wore green and did some of the Earth Day activities. I just got an email that the PTA has picked April 29th as a school wide day to CELEBRATE EARTH DAY. We will have planting, sprucing up our school grounds and collecting gently used, clean towels and blankets for the Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter. So we will do recycle, reduce, reuse lessons both days as well as talk about how we can take care of this wonderful world we live in.

We received a letter from a Kindergarten class of 15 students in Newport, Washington. They wrote to 100 schools on their 100th day of school. They are hoping to receive 100 responses. As it turns out one of the pages we did not get to last week in our Reader/Writer notebook was a form to teach general letter composition. It had the children fill out a short letter to a family member or friend. So I had the student's write what they would put in a letter to Cherenne and then we combined our ideas into out long group letter that I typed out on the computer! We will mail it from school tomorrow!

Please help your child remember that Tuesday is Qq day and EVERYONE can bring a show and tell that starts with the letter 'q'. It helps if they bring it in a bag or envelope as many of them like to keep it a secret until it's their turn to share. We are going to gather around my huge college quilt and share our items one at a time. Also, tomorrow, we are also talking more about the quarter and how much it is worth and what other coins equal 25 cents! If we have time I hope to do some more spring reading especially one of my favorites called 'The Egg Book" It's a short week and I always try to plan too much!

All five butterflies are out and if it is warmer tomorrow we will let them go. We have earned 299 compliments. When we get one more I will bring a compliment cake and we will celebrate and watch the "Butterflies" movie of the Magic School Bus series.

Thanks for reading all this to keep up to date on what we are learning in Kindergarten at Meadowlark!
Sincerely, Mrs. Clapper

WEAR GREEN on MONDAY

A quick note:

Tomorrow is Earth Day so please wear Green!

April 14th very early in the morning

I was so focused on the Thursday note home that I forgot to tell you about Wednesday's wonderful news!
The day started adding decorations and sentences to our duck's under the umbrella's so that they could decorate the halls.
It is exciting to see how some of them are labeling their picture and even adding full sentences to their artwork.

In Second Step, we tried to sing Row Row Row your boat as a round and discovered how hard it is to pay attention to one group and ignore the other group. This was a great introduction to a story about ignoring distractions and paying attention. After school, Mrs. Bartsch brought in a beautiful Big Book on Butterflies so in the next couple of days, the children will be reviewing the life cycle in many ways!

Yesterday afternoon, we had 2 very special visitors. Mrs. Hansen stopped into see us before they made one last trip to the storage shed. She came after the last recess, and for show and tell brought her daughter Zoe who is a lot of fun! The children had fun showing her the butterflies, too! As we said good-bye again some of us got teary eyed, but we are grateful for the time she could be with us.

Yesterday, one of our students realized she could read! It was such a special "ah-ha" moment for her anda treasured teacher moment for me! We work so hard to put together the skills it takes to read and we have students at many levels of awareness of print, that to actually watch her eyes light up and share her proud moment, made me so thankful to be a Kindergarten teacher!
Sincerely,
Carol Clapper

I am working to get Mrs. Bartsch's email set up to enter on the Blog, and learn how Mrs. Hansen added things like the newsletter. So bear with us as we make this change, and thanks for reading our Blog!

Unusual weather for our Umbrella Walk

Well, we were pretty excited for Umbrella Day and took our walk in the morning even though it wasn't raining and it wasn't sunny either. We made a giant "U" by sitting under our umbrellas the front entrance after we gathered under the flag pole. Many of the children wanted to tell about their umbrellas so we had our snack of left over carnival popcorn outside in a big circle and visited about the various umbrellas. It turned out to be sunny in the afternoon, so some of the children walked in the shade of their umbrella during the last recess. We also made ducks under umbrella's with a mom helper!

We had the fun story of "The Little Engine that Could" and transferred that good lesson to always giving it a go and doing our best even when we think something might be too hard. The duck and umbrella art took quite a bit of cutting. We used to do more art and worked on the cutting skills, so I knew some of the children might be frustrated with the cutting. So we talked about having a "I think I can" attitude! Tomorrow I have a different version of the same story that has a different illustrator. We will compare and contrast the stories as well as reemphasize this good lesson!

It's been fun to do Show and Tell with prewritten sentences! They are more interesting and we even got some that were verbs rather than something to show! We continue to work on the word 'said' and the quotation marks or 'talking lips'!

I look forward to being with the children all day Wednesday so Mrs. Bartsch can to go a special luncheon with her son that was planned before she took this teaching position.

Have a nice evening!
And please help your child remember his/her LIBRARY book.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Clapper

Great Start to our Week

We came in this morning and found a butterfly in the chrysallis jar. So we moved to a bigger cylinder net garden. The children an excited for the next 4 to come out! We could use a flower or two for our butterfly to get some nectar from. Hopefully the tulips will be coming out real soon!

Then before P.E. we got to go to to Mrs. Gibson's room and see eggs cracking in the incubator and 2 chicks in another container with food and water. One is yellow and the other multicolored. I will try to add a picture if I can!

In Math we worked on the different ways to make 8 and then 9. Later in the week we will have a fun graph to color in with the ways to make 10. Things are so busy this month, we haven't even filled in our blank April calendars, yet. We are also individually assessing the children with a new online tool. I am impressed with the results so far. Many children are counting by 5's to count the tally question, and some really understand adding numbers like 6 and4 and 2+1. Some are missing the subtraction or take away problems, but we haven't gotten to that part of the Math series, so I expect it to really improve by the end of the year!

Remember, tomorrow is Umbrella day and there is a 40% chance of rain!!! We will walk outside: rain or shine and enjoy some fun activities with our umbrellas.

Middle 'u' Show and Tell's need to write a sentence or two about what they are bringing. If you lost the purple paper, any paper will do!

Have a nice evening!

Sincerely,

Mrs. Clapper

Thursday

Surprise! Mrs. Clapper was the teacher in Room 7 today. Mrs. Bartsch's son was sick so I was the guest teacher for the day! It was a fun day full of lots of learning! We made the cover for our book of comments of when we said good bye to Mrs. Hansen. The children are at many varied reading levels. Each child should be able to read the first sentence in the book as well as the sentence they actually authored. Some students can read the whole book, and others need help on just a few of the tricky or extra long words! I used it as a learning tool to reinforce the word "said" and each child now gets to keep a highlighter in their school box as long as they only use it when the teacher says its OK!

We also planted some more seeds because only about 5 of our bean seeds actually sprouted. Hopefully we will see some results before our 5 day vacation at the end of the month.

Tomorrow is Music and Mrs. Bartsch will help us guess our new star student. Emma gets to take her poster and sentences that we wrote about her home!

Have fun at the Carnival and the next time I write on the BLOG it will be next Monday. I will have a computer with me and be connected most of the time. So email me if you have any questions.

One last thing, when I put together the Thursday newsletter and forgot to email the parents who like to be 'green' and just get it through email. So read those Thursday folders carefully this week and I will do try to do the electronic newletter to the parents that prefer it that way next week.

Have a great weekend! Mrs. Clapper

Wednesday

What a wonderful but hectic day! In the morning we started a math project that Mrs. Hansen had planned but didn't have time for. It was amazing, fun and took most of our morning! We started by making a pattern on a colored sheet of paper. The children could make their own design as long as it was a pattern that extended from top to bottom. Then we folded the paper and tore out a shape. This showed symmetry across the fold. So we titled our papers Patterns and Symmetry and glued our creation on another sheet and then wrote about it. The children transformed their shapes into caterpillars, worms, space ships, dinosaurs, stars and many other imaginative things. Instead of sending them home, we put them up in the hall. Mrs. Hansen hopes to be back next Wed. afternoon to bring her daughter Zoe to meet the children and she will enjoy seeing our math project in the hall.

Tomorrow right after school a PTA mom is going to wrap our Just4Mom basket for the carnival raffle. If you still have items to donate, Thursday is the last day to get it to school.

It has been brought to my attention that some of the girls are bringing toys to school and trading. The rule is only Show and Tells may come to school and even those are not shared at center time or used to distract from learning in any way. We will talk to the children about keeping their toys at home and especially NOT to sneak toys out of their house and give them away to friends at school.

Mrs. Bartsch had an great afternoon with the class and felt like it went well for their first time together! She is a cheerful, loving teacher and we are excited to have her. She did write a note that will come home in the Thursday folders to introduce herself to you. Her district email is in the process of getting set up, so send any correspondence you may have to my email and I will make sure she gets the information. As soon as we have one, we will continue to do as before and ask that you send emails to both of us and we will cc our reply to the other one too. It helps to be on the same page! Also in the folders are some carnival tickets for your child to use Friday night. I wish I could be there, but knowing they are having fun is the next best thing.

Have a great rest of the week! It's wonderful to be at Meadowlark!

Sincerely , Mrs. Clapper

Tuesday, April 5th

When we started the day, I was kicking myself for not making today "Umbrella Day"! Being the start of U week AND having it rain would have been a great learning experience, but I was afraid too many people would forget with the 3 day weekend. So we will hope for rain NEXT Tuesday on "UMBRELLA DAY as we continue to study 'u' sound in words. This week Show and Tell is with the 'u' sound in the beginning of the word. Next week it will be in the middle. I will be sending home a colorful blank paper in Thursday folders and I would like them to write a sentence about their Show and Tell, such as Macey has a little bus.

And the following week, even though I said NO show and tell with the short week, I think we are going to make Tuesday April 19th "Qq" day and everyone can bring something that starts with "Qq". Each time we talk about 'q' in class, we are going to say "Never write a q without a u! even though there are not too many times they will be writing words that start with "qu".

Mr. Croff is really wanting us all to focus on our respect and manners. It seems like there has been an outbreak of misbehavior and we want to nip it in the bud and focus on the positive. This week the manner is Expect the Best from Yourself. We will be talking about this one each time they are behaving and misbehaving to help them see that this is not just abot academic behavior but also being the best person you can be all around!

Tomorrow is Mrs. Bartsch's first afternoon with the children. She is working on a letter that introduces herself to you. It will be in the Thursday folders, unless she sends it home tomorrow. it's always a good thing to check your child's backpack every day. Today they brought home last week's Reader Writer Notebook pages as well as their March art. Have them read about when they feel lucky to you!

One last thing; I am not going to be in town for the carnival on Friday. To lend my support, I bought some tickets and will give each child 4 tickets in their Thursday Folders. I hope you can come enjoy this wonderful family fun night that benefits our school in many ways.

Have a nice evening,

Mrs. Clapper

My Last Day

What a precious day it was today to spend with my class. I have LOVED teaching them this year and am very sad that I will miss the last quarter. I am so excited though for Mrs. Bartsch, she is a wonderful person and a great teacher! Thank you so much for all the love and support you show your child! This has been a great year!!

~Mrs. Abigail Hansen