We certainly kicked the new year off with a snowy week!  Lots of fun was had on the playground in all the fresh snow we received.

We will have our STAR student assembly on Wednesday and will be focusing on A for accountability.

We had good news and sad news last week.  Brock was excited to welcome a new baby brother over the Christmas break!  This will be Bentley’s last week with our class as he will be moving to a new school.  We will miss him, but we know he’ll have a great time at his new school.

This week we are going to try something new during purposeful play.  We will be joining with the Ks and 1s for a social emotional lesson and then students will have the opportunity to break into multi age groups: outdoor play, dramatic play, art and construction toys.  We will have these groups two days a week with the other two days being in our classrooms.  We are excited to try something new!

Literacy:   I have decided not to continue with the reading log calendars.  Please continue to listen to your child read/read to them each night.  The goal is not only to build their skills as a reader, but also to build on their love of reading.  The students loved read Laura Numeroff’s “If you Give…” books last week.  If You Give A Pig A Pancake was the perfect read aloud after our pancake breakfast.

Our No Excuses words for this week are: all, going, him, see and where.  We practice spelling these words correctly and also how to use them correctly in sentences.  This week we will start learning about contractions.

Math:  This week our numbers will be 76-80.  You can ask your child to show you the number as tens and ones, get them to skip count to that number, make an addition or subtraction equation with that number as the answer, etc. 

We are continuing to work on doubles and doubles plus one facts and on representing numbers to 100 in several different ways.  Please practice skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s as I will be introducing coins this week.  There has been a lot of interest in the play money during purposeful play so I think they are ready.  I will be adding a cash register to our play resources so hopefully we can have a restaurant opening in the future.  We practiced our mental math last week and played a game on abcya.com that had us adding 4 dice together to find the sum.  They loved the challenge and it was great to hear them share their strategies with each other.  “I added the 3+3 first because they are doubles and that made 6.  3+1 makes 4 and 6 and 4 are ten partners.  So 3+3+1+3 =10”.  Some students are beginning to work on adding two digit numbers while others are continuing to work on building their mental math strength with sums to 20.  We are also working on answering questions about the calendar.

Dates to Remember

Monday, January 14: Papa John’s

Tuesday, January 15: Tots n Taters, Tuesday breakfast program begins

Wednesday, January 16: Library Books due

Thursday, January 17: Great Canadian Bagel

Friday, January 18: Tots n Taters                                         

Have a great week (with hopefully less shovelling)!​