A Buggy Week!

September 19, 2025

UPCOMING DATES & ANNOUNCEMENTS:

September 22 – October 3 – Parent/Teacher Partnership Meetings: Click Below to Sign up!
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OPMLNJCnSmRNRYpZPwtSg0pDKaSAlKmptVEYAcenoeM/edit?usp=sharing
Tuesday, September 23 – Preschool – 1st – School Pictures (check student folders for form)
Mark your calendars for Van-toberfest, October 18th! (Raffle tickets are in student folders!)
Before care is available starting at 7:30 am in the gym. Dismissal begins at 3:00 pm, with After Care available until 5:00 pm.

Dear Families,

What a beautiful (and buggy!) week we had in Senior Kindergarten! The warm weather brought plenty of curious little critters—and our students’ curiosity about bugs led us down many exciting learning paths.

🐞 Provocation Adventures

This week, our focus was all about bugs!

We began with a story called “Bugs” by David T. Greenberg, which introduced us to the three main parts of an insect: head, thorax, and abdomen. Be sure to ask your child to sing you the catchy bug body song we learned!
Inspired by this, students built their own loose-part bugs using beads, pinecones, sticks, marbles, and more to represent the three body parts.
On Wednesday, we read “Some Bugs” by Angela DiTerlizzi, which showed us how bugs can hunt, fight, and burrow. We then used flashlights to explore bug x-rays and even created our own versions.
Thursday’s read-aloud, “Heads and Tails” by John Canty, was an interactive guessing game—our little entomologists impressed us with their sharp observations!
To finish off the week, we learned the difference between vertebrates and invertebrates. Since bugs are invertebrates (no backbone), we created our own delicate invertebrates using pasta, beads, and pipe cleaners.

🔤 Phonics

In phonics, children are working at their own pace:

Some are focusing on 1–2 letters a week for recognition.
Others are already spelling and building words.

It’s such a joy to watch their faces light up as they realize “I’m a reader!”

🔢 Math

This week in math, we connected our bug theme to number learning:

We practiced number recognition and writing by cutting and gluing missing numbers on number lines.
We played with ladybug ten frames and counted how many ants were in their homes.
At our bug picnic, some sneaky bugs invaded our food, and we had to count how many joined us—or flew away!
Later, we stretched our brains with basic bug addition.

Our SK mathematicians are truly “moving and grooving!”