Dear Kinder families - Happy Thanksgiving! I am so thankful to you for sharing your amazing children with me. They fill my days with excitement, laughter, wonder, and lots of love. Thank you to all of you who sent in your turkey feathers. Each one was just as unique as your children are. ❤️ I hope you're enjoying some family time today and maybe even watching the parade together.

This afternoon we read Pete the Cat The First Thanksgiving to learn a little bit about where this holiday comes from.  Then, during our STEAM time we worked on engineering our own ship to carry our 'Pilgrim' (okay it was a stuffed frog) safely across the sea.  The Kinders had a blast doing this and I was impressed with their ideas and persistence! 

We're working on adding one more to a number during our Math Daily 3 time. Adding turkey feathers is one way we're practicing. Check out our Facebook video for another way we practiced today!

I sent home the holiday book order forms with your Kinder today.  There's a letter attached with our class activation code that you will need to use to link up to our classroom.  As always, you can order from the flyers or, if you go online you have a lot more available to you - even other grade levels (think siblings, cousins, holiday gifts, etc).  If you order books and would like them to be a surprise just let me know and I won't send them home with your child. Scholastic Book Orders are a great way to get awesome books for really great prices - seriously, you can find books for only $1! We also have a classroom wishlist on there for books we would love to add to our classroom library if you're interested in donating.  
The link for ordering online is below and our class activation code is ND3VG

  Coming home today in your Kinder's folder you will find a letter introducing you to our reading homework that will start on Monday, November 14th.  Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday your Kinder will bring his/her reading bag home with books for them to read to you! They're working hard on pointing to each word they say while reading and using beginning and ending sounds to tackle unfamiliar words and then looking at the picture to see if it makes sense. Your Kinder has chosen these books and they should be good fit books, meaning they can read them to you with minimal help. If your Kinder gets stuck please encourage them to try their strategies to decode the word, don't just tell them the word. One of the most important things about this homework is that your child remembers to bring their reading bag back to school every day.  We use these book bags daily in our classroom to help us become better readers.  Watching a child learn to read is nothing short of amazing and I'm looking forward to sharing this journey with all of you! 

Since yesterday was election day we decided to learn a little bit about voting and then give it a try ourselves!  First we read the fiction book Duck for President then we read a non fiction Let's Find Out  magazine all about voting.  We talked about how people choose who they want to vote for, and how they don't have to tell anyone who they voted for - voting is private.  After we learned a little bit about voting Kinders used the computer to take turns voting on who their favorite Mo Willems characters were.  Check out our results below! 

On Thursday, November 10th families are invited to share a Thanksgiving Lunch with us at school. The Thanksgiving meal will be served in the Cafeteria during our regular lunch period (11:50-12:15). Please meet us in the Cafeteria at 11:50 and share this special meal with us.  The cost for students is the same as their regular lunch price and the cost for adults and non student family members is $5.  


LUNCH MENU - I've had a couple people ask me for a lunch menu, and while we don't get paper copies and it is posted on the school's website, I was able to include a link to the menu in the calendars and schedules section of our class site/blog - You can access this by clicking the "more" tab at the top of the page. 

Thank you so much for joining us and supporting us for our Literacy Parade on Monday.  We had such a fantastic day sharing our love of Mo Willems' Elephant & Piggie books!  If you haven't read one before you should definitely check them out - they're our favorites.  Not only did we have a great time at the parade and snack afterwards, but we also created our own Piggie & Geralds to put on our bulletin board - complete with talk bubbles (of course) saying what our favorite Elephant & Piggie book is.  During our STEAM time we worked on engineering a bird nest to hold an egg on our head - just like right out of the book There's a Bird on Your Head!  Ask your Kinder what his/her favorite Elephant & Piggie book is and be sure to read it together - you're guaranteed to laugh! 

Here's a late post from our Pep Rally.  We had so much fun showing our Danville Spirit!