Weekly Update - January 19- 23

Weekly Update - January 19 - January 23

First let me apologize for the blog post hiatus. Between the holidays, flu season and report cards, it has been a very busy month. Hopefully, we are now back on track and we will give you an update on what has been happening in Room 20.

News Items:

Please welcome new students William M. and Janessa to our class :) 

Inquiries:

We are very interested in space and our solar system presently. Mrs. Shanna has created a fantastic space control center and rocket ship for the students to explore in in the dramatic play center, as well as a planet themed sensory bin seek and find game and a felt story board with planets and rockets. The kids are really enjoying learning about different planets, stars and what it's like in outer space. We encourage you to ask our child questions at home about what are learning and what they are wondering about. 

What We're Working On:

Math: creating our own board games! This is a fantastic math activity where we have encouraged students to create game boards using color patterns, numbers and symbols to create a game that they can play with family and friends. Playing these games helps them practice one to one correspondence (rolling the dice and moving that many spaces), creating and recognizing patterns and exploring the beginning stages of addition and subtraction (moving forward and back depending on the space they land on). Try playing your child's game with them when they bring it home :)

Literacy: We will be working on recognizing high frequency sight words in French such as 'les', 'le' 'la', 'ma' 'tu' and 'je'. A full list of sound blends and sight words will be sent home in the coming weeks for your child to practice.  We will also continue working more on our writing continuum. Some of you may remember seeing a "Bump it Up" wall (or "Echelle de succes" en francais) in our classroom. This wall has samples of student work at various levels of completeness which serves as a tool to help students "Bump up" their work and improve upon it as they go. We will specifically be working on writing in our writin journals and ensuring that our written text uses appropriate upper and lower case letters, is dated and matches the pictures we have drawn above. 

Science: We are exploring simple machines! specifically this week: pulleys (les poulies) and pendulums (les pendules).

Sensory Play: I spy seek and find sensory bin with space themed objects. 

Home Connection:

1) We took a short break from our home reading program but it will continue this week as usual. 

2) Please remind your child (we have talked to them in class) that remembering their note tote, library book, etc is their responsibility. We are working towards preparing them for future grades where they will have an increasing number of responsibilities. Thanks!

3) Also, new songs will be added to your child's note tote soon!

4) A few parents asked questions about our Open Houses and mentioned when we cancelled last week's open house that they were not aware it was happening in the first place. We would like to clarify that while the dates for all of our open houses were posted in a previous post, we understand that it was a while ago and that we should give reminders closer to the time. The reason we didn't do so this time was because, while the first two open houses we rather extravagant affairs, our open houses going forward will be much more like a regular day with open doors. We do not want parents to feel pressured to attend as we know that it can be very difficult to get time off work. We also don't want to have students upset if their parents aren't able to come. Therefore, going forward we will post the dates again (hopefully in the next couple days) and then post a quick reminder on the blog closer to the date. We will not be informing the students in advance. Hope this clears things up and sorry again for any confusion.