Gecko Gazette

We’re excited to kick off the month with our Apex Fun Run fundraiser! Families are invited to join us on the field to cheer on your child — it’s always a fun and energetic event!

In class, we’re beginning our Clothing Study, where we’ll explore where clothes come from, how we take care of them, and the many different types of clothing we wear. Later in the month, we’ll also be talking about things we’re thankful for and sampling some Thanksgiving foods during snack time as a fun introduction to the holiday meal.

It’s shaping up to be a quick month full of new learning and excitement!

November is full of fun happenings in kindergarten. Our APEX Fun Run fundraiser goes through November 7th, teaching students valuable leadership skills and helping raise funds for our school. Our Tolmachoff Farms field trip is scheduled for November 10th, and we can’t wait for the students to learn where so much of their food comes from, interact with animals, ride a tractor, and navigate a corn maze!

On the academic side of things, our next ELA unit explores ways we stay healthy, such as washing our hands, exercising, and getting enough sleep. Students will engage with many nonfiction texts, and with the teacher’s help, write research of their own! Social studies gets exciting in November, as we wrap up our maps unit with a group project, then dip our toes into holidays like Veterans Day and Thanksgiving while also acknowledging holidays around the world. In math, students will continue to engage in simple addition as well as subtraction, and build familiarity with teen numbers as they count. Science will continue to cover patterns in the sky - what do we see above us and how does it move? We teachers look forward to all this fun learning we will get to share with your students.

This November First grade is ready to fall in love with learning! :)

We are practicing our doubles facts in Math and identifying the point of view of different stories in Reading. In Writing a how-to book by brainstorming ideas, and then organizing the steps in order. In Science we are continuing to explore force and motion with experiments involving ramps and cars. We are using our knowledge of maps to fill in a grid and compare maps to globes in Social Studies.

Thank you to all the parents who came to our Fall Party! You made it such a great experience for all of us!

Thank you to everyone who helped fill our Tree of Gratitude during parent-teacher conferences — it was wonderful to see all the kind messages and thank-yous displayed.

We also have some exciting events coming up this school year! Please mark your calendars for our two field trips:

• Tuesday, December 2, 2025 – Musical Instrument Museum
  

• Thursday, April 23, 2026 – Desert Outdoor Center at Lake Pleasant

If you would like to chaperone one of our field trips, please make sure you’ve completed the volunteer training and let your child’s homeroom teacher know you’re interested in attending.

In Math, students are learning multiplying and dividing multi-digit numbers. We will take the District Fall iReady Diagnostic to see how much we’ve grown. In Science, we will analyze and interpret environmental data to demonstrate species adaptability, survival, and extinction. In Mandarin, we will continue expanding our vocabulary as well as learn to write a compare-and-contrast essay.

In reading, our focus this quarter has been on literary elements as part of Module 3. We’ll be wrapping up this module next week. In addition, students will be taking the fall NWEA assessment later this month to measure their growth over the semester. We plan to send home the results by the end of November.