Week of September 21-25

Dear Families,

It's hard to believe that summer will be over and autumn begins next week! The weather has been so beautiful!

We had a busy week in Room 166. On Monday the entire school attended the Terry Fox Assembly. Donation forms were sent home and are due by the end of the month please. Our first Scholastic Order was due today but you can send in your order forms by Monday at the latest. Pizza lunch orders are due online by September 25 for the first pizza lunch, and October 13th for the other pizza lunches.

Many thanks to Claire's dad who was our Mystery Reader this Thursday. Many thanks as well to our Grade Parents Mary (Martel's mom) and Theresa (Stella's mom) for compiling the Class Contact List and for coordinating our parent volunteers this year.

Just a reminder that your child needs TWO snacks each day. Please assist your child by explaining what his/her snacks are in his/her lunch bag. Some children are telling me their parents forgot to pack them a snack and then we find fruit or veggies in their lunch bag! We have snack at about 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. I have a water fountain in my classroom and the children can use their water bottles during outdoor play and at lunch.

PLEASE remember that we have a student with a nut and sesame allergy in our classroom. Lambton Kingsway is a nut-safe school and all commercially made products (such a protein-type bars) must have the "nut-free" logo and must not say "May contain nuts" on the list of ingredients. Any snacks that do not meet this criteria will be returned home. Thank you.

Within the next few weeks we will start our Reading Buddy program with Ms. Sunde's Grade 2 class! This is an exciting program for the children and a great learning experience and opportunity. Stay tuned for more information!

The children did a great job during our Lockdown practice. Next week the school will have a Fire Drill. We talked about these procedures and the children did a great job being very quiet and lining up. Every day the Juniors are learning more and more of our routines and I'm proud of how the Seniors are setting a terrific example for them!

This week in Literacy we "Read the Room" looking for upper and lower case letter matches; we played letter and letter sound bingo on the Smartboard (abcya.com); we "stretched out" and read three-letter words on the Smartboard; the SKs read and wrote colour words; we reviewed (SKs) and are learning (JKs) our sight words I, AM, IS and AND; the Special Person of the Day showed us how they "Fix Their Name" by unscrambling the letters.

In Numeracy we: counted (and the SKs wrote) the letters in our names; the JKs did Chicka Chicka counting coconuts; the SKs did a Number Hunt.

In Art we made Eye Spy Names; some children drew a bouquet of sunflowers in the class; made a Chicka Chicka Name tree. We will talk more about the sunflowers next week in Science.

In the Science Centre the children brought in a root from a tree in the playground; seeds; milk weed pods.

Next week we will learn All About Apples and will incorporate this inquiry into our Science, Numeracy, Literacy and Art activities. We will also examine our sunflowers more. We will start an Author Study on Laura Numeroff who wrote the wonderful books "If you Give a _____ a _______." We'll start with "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie!" and "If you give a Moose a Muffin." If you have copies of Numeroff's books at your home please send them in with your child so we can read along! I have one copy of each of her books. It will be fun! Look for lots of activities in next week's and the following week's mailbags! If you remember, please send in apples, cookies and muffins for snacks this week to go with our learning!

The Seniors received their new Journals in today's mailbag. I have attached a list of 100 high frequency words as a little dictionary on the back page. I have also glued in the list of things you asked your child to write about this year, as a guideline, and a list of Dos and Don'ts (i.e. do skip lines, do use the popcorn words, do sound words out, don't write out the sentences for your child to copy from). Please return your child's journal each Monday. I am really looking forward to reading them and to seeing all the lovely accompanying pictures!

That's the news from Room 166. I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Mrs. Tyndall