(This page also allows you- the parents- to sign up for electronic notification of
new, important information we add to this particular page. It will also have our
weekly newsletter. It's just an easy way to get the "heads-up" kind of stuff. So, if
you'd like to sign up, just follow the prompts below!)

 

(Posted June 15)

Dear Parents and Snowkids,

What a fantastic year we have had together! Thank you so much for all the support and love you gave Mrs. Meeks and me this year! We have been truly honored to teach your children. They have all done a remarkable job and we are so proud of them! Have a wonderful and safe summer and we'll see everyone next year. Love, Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Meeks

 

(Posted June 8)

 

First off, I have to just say a gigantic "thank you!" for the incredibly generous end-of-the-year presents you all gave Mrs. Meeks and me! The book the children made is truly something I will treasure forever and the gift certificates are so much appreciated!!! (We do love to shop and eat!) You all have been such a wonderfully supportive group of parents, and we could not have done all that we did without that love and support! Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

 

Incredibly, the year is ending! This is always a bittersweet time for us because we are so proud of all the growth your children have made with us! We know they are ready for success next year! But, we are sad to say goodbye to each other. Snowkids are famous for hall hugs and Mrs.Meeks and I look forward to getting lots of them next year from our alumni!

 

Just to touch base about a few ending details: the last day of school is this Friday, June 12th. Officially, that is a full day, not a half day. Classroom assignments for next year will be given to you on Friday, July 17th. Your child's classroom teacher for the year will call your home that afternoon or evening. Open House for next year will be late afternoon Monday, July 20th- usually starting at 4:00, I believe.

 

Our annual Pirate/Princess day will be this Thursday, June 11th. Your child is welcome to come dressed as a pirate, princess or mermaid. Gender roles are not specific- if we have boy mermen and girl pirates- FABULOUS! Please do not feel pressured to purchase anything for your child's costume! You're welcome to, of course, do it up as elaborately as you choose. But, I have taught the kids how to make paper pirate hats, treasure maps, and eye-patches. They got bandanas for fun day and they will have their Crabby T-Shirts back from painting by then as well- so feel free to keep it simple! I'll also provide temporary tatoos that day as a special treat. We'll rotate to other kindergarten classes that morning and enjoy fun activities. My room will be doing a giant pirate ship ring toss!

 

Just a few of us are retesting on core words today- and after that, all assessements are finished. We are wrapping up our year learning all about pirates, princesses and mermaids. We're also reading lots of fairy tales starring princesses, princes, pirates and swashbuckling adventure! We are making pirate ships, pirate scenes and writing pirate stories. We're finishing up a few more pages in our handwriting books and math workbooks. Then all of those things will be coming home. Today we are sending home most of our Ocean Inquiry art work. There will be no tree map this week- if you need to change your child's transportation please just drop a note into their purple folder. Thanks again, for all you have done to make this such a magical year for us! We are deeply grateful! Love, Mrs. Snow

(Posted June 4)

 

Attention Parents: If it is lightning and thundering tomorrow, Friday at 8:30, water play will be postponed until Monday at 8:30. If it is storming on Monday, we’ll try Tuesday. The Inquiry and End of Year Celebration will take place tomorrow, Friday, from 11:00-12:30, no matter the weather. J

(Posted May 22)

We've dived right into our Ocean Inquiry! The wall outside our room is being magically transformed to a window into the sea! We have sting-rays, sea turtles, The Rainbow Fish (complete with only one sparkly scale left- to show that he learned not to be greedy) and sea-stars (formerly known as starfish.) We have completed all our reading assessments this week! Huraayeee!

 

In math this week we are using Goldfish crackers to work on subtraction stories. It's pretty much the funnest way to do math, unless maybe we were doing fractions with pizzas! Anyway, we love eating them to subtract! We're working on using number sentences to represent our word stories. One way to stay math sharp over the upcoming break is to let your child "count the calendar" with you everyday. Talk about the numbers and have them go both forwards and backwards.

 

This week in writing we are learning to use handwriting paper we'll see in first grade. We've made great progress in our Ocean Journals- we've done a circle map and two tree maps this week. After we work on the smartboard together, we get to do independent work. This will help us in the transition to first grade as well. After our last tree map, we wrote 5 sentences all by ourselves and did a fabulous job! We are really making those connections in our writing and it's so exciting to see the children putting it all together on paper!

 

We have harvested the strawberries several times this week! Reports are that this crop was particularly sweet! Our beans are coming up in the garden as well. Some of our baggie-planted beans sprouted. Some, not so much.

 

It's been fun reading lots of non-fiction books on sea animals this week. We have also read some classic fiction- like The Tale of the Three Little Fish and the Big Bad Shark! We are using the smartboard and computer a lot to research sting rays, clownfish, sharks and other deep sea creatures. Next week we'll focus on crabs, jellyfish and octopus!

 

Please note that all bag books, picture money, library books and sight word rings are due back next Friday. Have a safe and fun holiday weekend and we'll see everyone swimming back in our ocean Tuesday! Warmly, Mrs. Snow

(Posted May 7)
Incredibly, the year is wrapping up! It's hard to believe that we are coming to the
end! The kids have grown and developed in such wonderful ways!

We have wrapped up our author's study on Beatrix Potter. In conjunction, we are
finishing our unit on gardens and life cycles with a BANG on our field trip Wednesday
to the Arboretum and Lowes grocery store. If you haven't gotten to see it yet, the
wall outside our room has turned into a beautiful garden, complete with flowers,
bunnies and carrots! Also, we have been watching our real garden carefully as our
newly planted carrot seeds begin to sprout. It's such a great way to learn about the
life cycle of plants hands-on! We've hydroponically planted our beans and are eagerly
awaiting their sprouts! The beans we planted in the garden are already two inches
high! They grow so fast! Our strawberries continue to ripen a few at a time. Sometimes
they taste great, sometimes they're sour!

After the field trip on Wednesday we'll kick off the final Inquiry on Oceans! The
students will be asked to complete a project at home on their favorite ocean animal
and more details about that will come home next Thursday. The Inquiry will culminate
in a fantastic week focused on Pirates and Mermaids. Friday, June 5th will be our
water-play day. That will also be our Oceans Inquiry celebration day. Weather
permitting, we'll picnic on the grounds after an extremely active morning playing on
Slip-n-Slides, wading pools and sprinklers. If the weather does not permit, meaning,
it's thundering and lightning all morning (not just drizzle) we'll do it all on
Monday, the 8th. This will be our "end of year hooray". We do not do Kindergarten
graduation at Codington. Water play will start at 8:30, or as soon as we can get the
Slip-n-Slides and pools set up. It will go until 10:00. At that time we'll dry off,
get our clothes on, and go to specials. While the kids are at specials we can set up
the room for the picnic/party. When they get back at 11:00, we'll have lunch,
celebrate and the whole shabang will end by 12:30. More details on this exciting day
will also be coming home next week, so be on the lookout please.

We will continue to be doing math assessments next week. Reading assessments will be
done the following two weeks during EOG's. The students have worked extremely hard
this year and I know they're ready do to their best on the tests. Our writing
assessment will be the week of EOG's as well.

Thank you for all your support during the final days of kindergarten. It's a wild ride
to the end and the days will absolutely fly by! Enjoy! Warmly, Mrs. Snow




(Posted April 24)
P.S.) If your child comes home today (Friday)talking about watching rockets launch,
yes, we did get to see REAL LIVE rocket launches, complete with paratroopers, by the
5th graders who have been participating in Starbase this past week. It was soooooo
excitingly cool! We can't WAIT to be in 5th grade and make our own rockets! We'll be
in that grade in the BLINK of an EYE!

(Posted April 23)

Many thanks to Mr.Morse, The Rabbit Guy, for coming and sharing all his rabbit friends
with us! We had a great time learning about rabbits and getting to pet them! Thanks
also to the folks at North Carolina Aquarium for coming out and doing Turtle Talk with
us! We got to touch a turtle and learn all about different types of turtles, habitats,
and how we can help turtles stay safe!

Of course, we're still focusing on our Beatrix Potter author study, but with turtles
AND rabbits visiting our class in the same week, we HAD to do SOME work with The Tale
of the Tortise and the Hare! We've read the story and are making both turtle hats and
rabbit hats so we can act it out tomorrow too- along with The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
Thanks to the good weather, Mrs. Snow was finally able to get the "rabbit burrow" here
and we've had a wonderful week with it in our home living center. Tomorrow we'll move
it outside for our skits. Our pretend paper garden on our wall continues to sprout
beautiful things. We're working on our real garden as well. We harvested a strawberry
this week! Report was that it was delicious! It's amazing to watch plants do their
thing! Next week we'll begin sprouting our green beans and we'll plant them in our
garden once they're ready. Also next week, we'll be planting something very special
for Mom!

You should have gotten a flyer in the purple folder this week about Make a Plate. If
you didn't, please send a note in the purple folder or shoot me a quick email so we
can get you the information. Money is due next Friday, the 1st for Make a Plate.

Scholastic Book Orders are due tomorrow. This will be our last order of the year.

This week we wrote our own ending to The Tortise and the Hare and we made diagrams of
rabbits. We learned that a diagram is a picture with labels. The labels tell us the
parts of the thing. In math we continue to work on "more, less, equal" as well as
number sense from 20-30 and calendar skills.

Have a wonderful weekend! Warmly, Mrs. Snow
(Posted April 14)

Welcome BACK!
First off, we had a fantastic time with all our community helper parents! Thanks all
who came out to share with us before break about what you do while we're at school!
The kids love to learn what other Moms and Dads do at work and your contributions
really enriched the Community Helpers unit!

We are bouncing into an author's study of Beatrix Potter- with lots of focus on Peter
Rabbit this week. Next week we'll also begin to examine her other characters and that
leads us seamlessly into discussing life cycles of animals and plants. Yesterday we
pulled up the carrots that we planted last YEAR and they are HUGE!!! We're sending one
home with each child. Next week we'll plant new carrot seeds and other plants in our
Peter Rabbit garden. The garden is located just outside the kindergarten wing door-
the first planter on the right if you're facing the building- should you ever want to
take a look at what we're growing. Right now we have strawberries, cabbage and
petunias.

As we read Peter Rabbit we are spending a lot of time discussing setting. While we do
so, we are creating the setting of the story using "dot painting" technique (kind of
like Monet used)with watercolors to recreate the soft colors Ms.Potter used when
illustrating the book. You can see our setting outside our door! We're also using
giant cardboard cartons to create a rabbit warren that our little bunnies can actually
go into! This will be in the home living center for a while, once we complete the job.
We will then use the warren and outside Peter Rabbit garden to act out the story.
We'll also use several thinking maps to write about Peter Rabbit
and rabbits.

In math this week and next we continue to work hard on numbers 20-30. Some of us still
need some practice with writing these numbers without inverting them. We're also
working on Peter Rabbit puzzles and a number matching concentration game. And, as
always, we continue to work on calendar concepts as well as More, Less, Equal.

We have introduced "first grade" writing paper this week and we'll be working on Peter
Rabbit descriptions and stories. We continue to encourage children to complete quality
work using lots of detail in their pictures. We'll finish officially teaching
lowercase letters soon and then be fine tuning our handwriting skills. Children need
to be beginning sentences with capital letters and ending them with periods
consistently. Also, our kindergarten core words should all be spelled correctly within
our writing.

We look forward to having our annual visit from Mr.Morse- a rabbit expert- who brings
his rabbits in for us to meet and touch! He gives us lots of great information about
rabbits and we so enjoy getting a chance to pet them and see them up close!

Report Cards come home today. Please have a wonderful evening celebrating your child's
accomplishments with them! They have worked so hard and learned so much. A good rule
of thumb is to spend 3 times as much time celebrating what they have learned as you do
discussing what they need to work on for improvement. That will keep the report card
experience positive and help them understand that they have so much to be proud about!

Our last Scholastic Book Order for the year is also coming home today. Orders and
money are due by Friday, the 24th.

Have a hoppy week! Warmly, Mrs. Snow

(Posted March 9)
What an awesome job our Sneetches and Mr.McBean did!!! I could NOT be more proud of
them! It was the first year that we had no paralyzing stage fright, nobody flubbed the
lines (including me!), the props held together and everything was perfect! Thank you
so much for coming out to see the performance- the kids seemed to have a great time.
They were SO sick of practicing, but as I told them, if you practice enough, then when
it's show time, you will know exactly what to do
even when you're really nervous! And they DID! Special thanks to Mrs.Pino for helping
with the costumes and props before and after the show.

We started that big week off with a bang, doing our Dr.Seuss birthday activities on
Monday. We dressed up as Cats in Hats, had the Cat in the Hat come read to us, had 4th
graders do a play for us AND ate real green eggs and ham! What a DAY! The Seuss fun
and learning continued as we spent the week reading and writing all about Seuss
subjects. There is a new movie link on this homepage for the Cat in the Hat movie-
just click on the cat and it should work.

As we head into the final two weeks we'll be focusing on Community Helpers. This gives
us an opportunity to invite our parents in to talk with us about what YOU do during
the day while we're at school! If you would be interested in coming in to talk with
us, just let me know when you're available. The only times we can't do it are between
9:15-11:00 and 11:20-11:55 (most days). There are a couple of assemblies and 1/2 days
to schedule around, but just let me know what works for you. Generally, the best time
is 8:00-8:30 but we are flexible. If you are coming in and have some kind of visual
aid or "hands-on" kinds of things to share with the kids, that
helps them "get it" better. Even if you just have a work web-site or something from
the computer that we can show on the Smartboard Screen- pictures really help them
focus. Grandparents are also welcome to come in and share what they do now or what
they used to do.

St.Patrick's Day is coming up next week. You are welcome to send your child to school
wearing something green, although of course, it's not required. Also, don't forget our
field trip next Wednesday the 18th. For those of you who chose to send a lunch from
home, I'll be sending home Ziplocs for you to please place all items including drink
inside.

Finally, I'd like to say a HUGE thank you to Jamie, the Wards and all the Snowfamiles
for the wonderful donations to the class collected in honor of Jamie's birthday! What
a fantastically generous way to teach children about the joys of giving to commemorate
important occasions! All the arts, crafts, games, puzzles and supplies are really
appreciated and we'll definitely put the Wal-Mart cards to good use soon! Thank you,
again, for being such an incredible group of folks- your support makes it possible to
keep doing our fun things and we couldn't do it without you.

Enjoy the "Spring Tease" and before ya know it, the real deal will be here! Warmly,
Mrs. Snow