Upcoming Dates / Reminders:
- There a couple report card envelopes that need to come in. Please return so we can reuse the envelopes each term.
- Book Exchange is on Thursday morning. Please return your library books by Wednesday. Thank you to those who have returned the December poem duotangs.
- Read Around the Room this week on Friday, 8:40-9:00am. Parents and grandparents welcome!
- Save the Date! We are heading to the museum by school bus on February 18th and need some parent volunteers to join us. You must have a criminal records check done for this trip, as you will be chaperoning 2-3 students in the museum. Permission slips will be going home in early February where you can indicate if you'd like to join us. This is an all day field trip.
Classroom News:
Social Responsibility: For the next 2 weeks we will be talking about citizenship. We can be a good citizen by being a good friend. Can you share with your child about who your best friend was as a child and how you became friends? We talked today about what makes a good friend. They had some great ideas. I put a picture up of our ideas on twitter. Later in the week we will be learning how to be a good citizen by respecting the rules. In class we will be talking about some classroom, school, and playground rules and wondering what school would be like without rules. At home you can talk about some rules or laws that adults must follow and share what you think is the most important rule or law.
Literacy:
- On Monday we talked about 'Learning Targets.' Like New Year's goals, Learning Targets help us work towards something that we would like to get better at. In Journal, our learning targets are detailed drawings, careful colouring, and at least 1 word. I was so pleased to see how many learners challenged themselves to write a word. We have talked about stretching out a word and if they only get the initial sound, that is great. Some learners wrote 1-2 sounds, a word, or even a sentence. I do not correct the spelling for them. At this point we want to focus on encouraging them to write.
- Today I introduced the students to 'Alphablocks' - short videos on letter sounds. We are starting to join the sounds to form words. This week we are focusing on 's' and 'a.' We will watch the Alphablocks, practice correct formation with our bodies, playdough, and printing.
Science: Winter has begun and we shared what we like about winter. Most learners mentioned snow. We played a drama game called 'Yes, let's!' We built a snowman and decorated them. We built an igloo, crawled inside and built a fire. Of course we had to roast marshmallows and make s'mores before curling up for a winter sleep. After 'Yes, let's!' we looked at a picture of a winter scene and shared words that we thought while looking at the picture. We will continue to add words to our picture and read lots of books on winter this week.
Art: This week we read Elmer by David McKee. Elmer is a colourful patchwork elephant who has a cheerful personality. One day he thinks he needs to look like all of his friends in order to fit in so he painted himself grey. All of his elephant friends really missed him and were lonely and sad. One day the rain came tumbling down and Elmer's grey paint washed away and his friends were so excited to have their friends back. They reminded Elmer that what they like best about him was that he was no ordinary elephant. They like that he was unique and different. We made our own patchwork elephants and wrote about what we like about ourselves.
Gym: We are starting off 2016 with some cooperative games: Bridges & Rivers, Freeze & Melt, and Rainbow Road.