Sunday, May 4, 2014

Week of May 5-9

Dear families,

May already! The children are happy to be on the bikes and scooters again during outdoor play!

This week we continued our fun Author Study about Mo Willems, who is the Emmy-award winning writer for Sesame Street and who wrote the best-selling "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus" book as well as the other pigeon books and "Elephant and Piggie" books. The kids love them and I have two copies of the pigeon books as well as several of Willems' other books from our library so the kids can pair-share read them during reading time. We have talked and written about the differences between what pigeon wants vs what he needs (important life lesson!) as well as comparing real pigeons and Mo Willems' pigeon in a Venn diagram. The SK homework for this weekend was to do the same diagram at home. This week we will finish writing and illustrating our booklets "Don't Let The..." inspired by Mo Willems' book. The children's ideas and drawing were terrific! They will go home in this week's white bags along with their other work.

We are also practicing our "popcorn words" each day in our centres - words that are found frequently in sentences, such as "the, it, is, and, I, like, in, to" etc.

On Friday we welcomed Artist Janeen who did a wonderful job leading and art class with the children. The art is on display on our hallway bulletin Board. This week and next we welcome two important members of our community - Police Officer Rich (pm class on May 7, am class on May 14) and Firefighter Paul (May 9).

Thank you for May's Scholastic orders. The next and last Scholastic order will be due May 31. Thank you again to Megan and her mom who kindly collate and date stamp all the Scholastic booklets that you receive.

The Show and Tell item for May and June on your child's special date should be something about "My Family." It could be a picture, a drawing, a story, etc.

May and June are incredibly busy months with DRA testing, report cards, and so on. If your child is in Senior Kindergarten please send in a baby picture by June 1st for the Graduation Ceremony and DVD. Thank you.

Thank you to our Parent Volunteers this week: Lexa's mom, Mario's mom, Sophie's mom, Lily G.'s mom, Quentin's mom, Jack L.'s Nana and Victoria's mom. Thank you so much.

Have a terrific week and enjoy the Spring weather!