Parents, We have had a lot of fun with Groundhog Day yesterday and today! Ask your child about the record player and giant CD (album) we danced to today. We also had yummy gummy bears for math sorting, graphing and counting and comparing. We will be working on money all this month as we have discussions about the Presidents and how they are on our coins and bills. We sent home a letter today asking all students to bring in one penny, nickel, dime, quarter and one dollar bill. Please refer to the letter for instructions on this. We will study the money with a magnifying glass, and play games with it as well. When we feel the students are accomplished with their knowledge of money we will take them to the school store to shop.

The children are doing a great job with the homework using the words of the week. remind them of the conventions good writers use, begin with a capital, spaces between words and punctuation. When you work on Rainbow words, remember to work on all the words in every color, not just the row they are working to accomplish. Some important dates to remember; Valentine boxes due Monday the 13th, and Donuts for Dad is Thursday, March 1 @ 8:15-9:00. Thank you for all you do to help your child be successful in school!

Dear Parents,

I just wanted to let you know that, as a gala auction item, the kindergarten team is offering "Munchies and a Moonwalk."

This will be for 12 lucky students. Bounce away with the kindergarten team after school at GM for approximately 1.5 hours.  Fun snacks provided.  Top two bids for each teacher.  Date and time to be worked out between teachers and parents.

The Gala Auction will be held February 4, 2012 at Olde Towne Athletic Club from 7 to 11 PM. Tickets are on sale at http://gmefoundation.org - $35 and $45 at the door or you can Download 2012GALATicketformto purchase tickets in advance. Visit the website for a sample of items to bid on. All proceeds go back to GMEF.

The proceeds will be used to improve our school by providing funding for programs such as technology, educational curriculum and facility improvements. The GMEF will accumulate and distribute resources beyond those provided by Cobb County or the PTA, in order to further enhance, foster and enrich the educational experiences of all students at Garrison Mill.

Thank you for your support!

Happy New Year ! I hope everyone had a wonderful, restful holiday. We are ready to get started on a new and exciting 2012. We will be exploring the season of Winter with lots of themed snow centers, artic animals, and hibernating animals. All of these will be incorporated into our standards in Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies and Health. Please take some time to look at the Sign-up Genius that Carrie Stribling has sent out to see when you can participate in our Literacy Centers and Reading Parent.

In Math we will continue to study money by identifying the coins and their value and making fair trades involving combinations of coins. Soon we will set up centers for the students to "buy" classroom objects when they are accomplished at combining coins. You can help your student at home by having them buy a snack or other items around the house. Flipping coins and separating them by heads or tails is a fun activity also. Ask them to sing you the Money Song.

We will continue to work on building sentences with capitals, spaces and phonetic spelling. Soon we will be asking the children to write sentences at home with the words of the week. You can help them by asking them to think of a sentence using the word, count the number of words in the sentence, then ask them "What are the three things good writers do?" They should be able to tell you 1. start with a capital, 2. spaces between words, 3. end with punctuation. We have been working on this for a while now, and they know we are not concerned with correct spelling. Please let them sound out one word at a time and write what they hear. Ask them to read it to you and see if it makes sense. If they want to write more than one of course we would love that !

Parents, We are looking forward to our field trip tp the Pumpkin Patch! Please dress your child appropriately, and label jackets as well as their lunch which needs to be completely disposable. If your student is buying their lunch, it will be paid for out of their account and we will transport it in coolers. We do not have room on the bus for parents, but you can follow us or meet us there. We will leave school at 9:15, and hope to return around 1:30. If you drive you can sign your child out with us  with a written note and they may go home with you.

We have just finished Chapter #4 in our math booklets. Please look at this with your child and they can do the follow up booklet for homework. Please return them and they will earn stickers for their chart. The next chapter is Geometry. Our standards state that students will name simple two-dimensional figures: triangles, rectangles, squares and circles, and three-dimensional figures cubes and spheres.  We will compare shapes with vocabulary such as edge, corner, curve, and if the shapes roll, stack or slide. Students will be expected to combine shapes into basic and more complicated shapes and decompose basic shapes into combinations. We will be represent basic shapes with drawings such as using a triangle and a square to represent a house. Have your child find 2 and 3 dimensional shapes around the house. Please keep up with our "Rainbow Words" as we have almost completed the orange words. It is much easier to keep up with them two at a time. Next week is conference week and I am looking forward to speaking with everyone. Please be on time as we only have 20 minutes together, and many people have back to back conferences with siblings. It is also Early Release all week which means dismissal is at 12:20.

Next month we will be preparing for our annual Grandparents luncheon. Kindergarten is scheduled for Friday  November 18, and we will have a short play for you just before our lunch time. More informations will be coming home later. To prepare for this we are asking each child to bring in a light colored (no patterns) pillow case. I will be dying these and the children will be painting on them to make our Indian Vests. Please send these in by November 3. This is a tradition for our students, and everyone is welcome, not just Grandparents. We hope to have someone here for each child. Keep sending in those paper towel and toilet paper rolls! See you next week.

We had a great time today at our in house field trip High Touch, High Tech! As "scientists" we covered all our standards for rocks and minerals. We used our senses to observe and group rocks by physical attributes such as large and small, smooth and rough, dark and light, and transparent and opaque. We also used our senses to observe the physical attributes of soil such as texture, smell, color, particle and grain. The children really enjoyed digging in the two kinds of sand (one from Hawaii and one from Georgia) to find their own rocks and identify them as well as classify them into catagories. Each student will bring home their bag of rocks and a certificate of participation. Ask your child about their time as "geologists" and what they learned.

In Math we are almost finished with our third chapter. We are working on numbers 0-5 using one to one correspondence as well as comparing sets with words such as fewer, more,  greater, less than and equal. Writing numbers seems to be very hard for them, and we are seeing a lot of backwards numbers  which is very common, but we need your help with this skill. Please practice using the Zaner-Bloser handwriting sheets we passed out at Open House. Next we will be estimating quantities using five and ten as a benchmark. (e.g. 9 is one five and four more. It is closer to ten, which can be represented as one ten, or two fives, than it is to five.)

This week's theme is Colors. Refer to the behavior sheet for the color of the day to wear if possible. Friday we will do an experiment with food coloring and mixing primary and secondary colors. Keep collecting those cardboard tubes for our log cabin. Thank you for all you do!

Parents, We had a very busy week! Thank you for coming to open house last Thursday, it was great seeing everyone. I know the children are tired, we are too! Make sure they get plenty of sleep, it's a long day.

Last week we did 10 pages in our Math booklet for Chapter 1, Sorting and Classifying. We used snap cubes for our "number talk" and sang and danced our way through the alphabet with sounds and vowels. On Friday we even ate a bus (ask your child). Hopefully your student told you how the "K" teachers brought to life some Nursery Rhymes in the Media Center. We will be doing a lot of rhyming as we explore more Nursery Rhymes with our Literacy Centers. Expect to see the Weekly News on the back of the behavior sheet, Please sign where indicated and keep this in the folder all week. Please put all communication in the folder as we look at these first thing in the morning.

We will be assessing the children during the next two weeks on numbers, letter recognition and sounds. If your child is a reader we will STAR test them individually to determine their reading level so we can differentiate our curriculum accordingly.

Thank you for all you do to help your child be successful in school. Together we can make this a great year!

Parents, We had a very busy week! Thank you for coming to open house last Thursday, it was great seeing everyone. I know the children are tired, we are too! Make sure they get plenty of sleep, it's a long day.

Last week we did 10 pages in our Math booklet for Chapter 1, Sorting and Classifying. We used snap cubes for our "number talk" and sang and danced our way through the alphabet with sounds and vowels. On Friday we even ate a bus (ask your child). Hopefully your student told you how the "K" teachers brought to life some Nursery Rhymes in the Media Center. We will be doing a lot of rhyming as we explore more Nursery Rhymes with our Literacy Centers. Expect to see the Weekly News on the back of the behavior sheet, Please sign where indicated and keep this in the folder all week. Please put all communication in the folder as we look at these first thing in the morning.

We will be assessing the children during the next two weeks on numbers, letter recognition and sounds. If your child is a reader we will STAR test them individually to determine their reading level so we can differentiate our curriculum accordingly.

Thank you for all you do to help your child be successful in school. Together we can make this a great year!