Dear families,
I hope you are having a nice weekend. Still no snow!
I have sent home this month's December words (which are on both sides of the sheet) and the December Homework Bingo. We practise these words every day at Circle Time as well as the two songs and one poem we will be presenting at the December 15 Festive Sharing Assembly. I hope you can come! It will be at 9 a.m. in the Gym, as always.
This week was all about the Folktale Cinderella. We read different versions, the children play-acted the story, and they did number and alphabet mazes (correct order of letters and numbers) to help get Cinderella to her glass slipper. The Seniors worked on read and write dry erase boards to copy Cinderella sight words, and almost all the children have completed their awesome shoe box castles! I think I heard myself say "leave space for the mortar between the stones" 28 times :). I hope they have a lot of fun at home recreating scenes from folktales and making up their own stories with them! A great follow up activity to do at home would be for your child to measure his/her castle using a tape measure. The children also took turns using the boxes to build a class castle and I loved their descriptive words about how they built it and the features it had. Wonderful cooperative play! Miss Nisker read a non-fiction book about castles which the children found very interesting - it helped them with ideas for their big class castle! The children also read and coloured a little pattern book called "Who Can You See?" about Cinderella.
The Seniors practised clapping syllables of Cinderella words (i.e. godmother = 3 claps, slipper =2 claps) to assist them with their writing. The homework for the SKs is to complete the sight word booklet that they practised in class on the dry-erase boards. The Juniors and Seniors practised their 10-frames with beads and played a ten-frame game with dice.
Thank you to Theo's mom who helped out in the Computer Lab, and to our Mystery Readers Megan (who is now in Grade One!) and Iris' dad, who brought in a fairy tale book. Thank you to Martel's mom who made play dough. This week we will read several versions of The Gingerbread Man, and the play- dough will be handy! We will focus on this folktale in the morning and will do our Holiday/Christmas activities in the afternoons, starting with Elf Capades! The kids were very excited that Alfie the Elf had arrived in our classroom! The children will make an elf from wallpaper pieces and will write a list of what the elves have to do before Christmas. Miss Nisker will be teaching the children about Hanukkah. Thank you Miss. Nisker! We'll also make real gingerbread cookies in class and bake them in the school's oven. I can't wait!
I have completed the literacy and numeracy assessments for the Seniors. Juniors have their formal assessments next term. Please feel free to contact me at any time to arrange for a meeting about your child's progress.
That's my news for this week - see you tomorrow!
Mrs. Tyndall
