Weekly+Newsletter

Weekly Newsletter -1/4/2013

__Busy Bees!__ Welcome back! We hope that everyone had a nice Christmas and happy new year! The weeks coming up are going to be packed full of many fun activities and learning units! We are very excited about our upcoming events! We discussed the letter “R” this week. We made a chart of words that start with this letter, and we made an “R” book. We also played a few games to help the students in identifying the sounds of both of these letters. We reviewed all four seasons and discussed the winter season more in depth. We discussed winter weather in our town vs. winter weather in other places around the world. We made a thinking map to illustrate what our winter weather is like. The students had a lot of fun with our winter sorting activity. They had to sort the winter items and summer items into the correct groups. We also read several winter books and did a few winter writing activities. We will be starting assessments for the next report card period very soon. Here is a heads up on a __few__ of the skills we will be assessing: letter and letter sound recognition, sight word recognition, counting/using numbers to 20, number recognition, setting of a story, author/illustrator, predicting, sequencing, rhyming words, beginning sounds of words, sorting, positional words, and writing a simple sentence. Please review these skills with your child.

__Learning But Having Fun!__ While reading the book __The Mitten__, our class had a lot of fun role playing to pretend we were the characters in this story. The students crawled into the “mitten” just like the animals in the story did. Look for pictures from this activity to be posted on our website soon.


 * On January 11th, we will have written expression day. On this day, the students will be given a writing prompt. They will have to write about the topic given and draw a picture that relates. We are not allowed to help them with this. This writing assessment will be graded. The results of the assessment will be kept in their literacy folder that will go with them to first grade next year. Therefore, please make sure you continue to work on writing skills at home, and we will be doing the same each day at school.

***I will be providing the opportunity in a couple of weeks for each family to schedule a parent/teacher conference, so you can review all assessments completed on your child thus far. This is a great way for us to sit down and address any concerns if there are any. This also allows you the opportunity to stay involved and informed of what is going on in your child’s education. A letter will be going home soon with more information about this.

__ Books of the Week __

Rosie Rabbit’s Radish Goldilock’s and the Three Bears The Mitten The Hat The Biggest Snowman Ever Grumpy Bunny’s Snowy Day The Jacket I Wear In The Snow The Snowy Day

__Preview....What's Coming Up Next!__

- Letters R and K - Cultures around the world - Problem Solving (Subtraction) - Drawing conclusions