Friday. September 9

Dear families,

We've had our first week of school! I am so happy to say that the children are all adjusting very well and are learning the classroom routines very quickly! I'm proud of them! Next week we will continue to establish and review routines. It will take many of the JKs the whole first term to learn all the various rules and routines. I am encouraging the Seniors to help the Juniors and be leaders.

This week there were a number of letters sent home to be signed and returned. Please make sure you send back your completed forms. Thank you. SK Parents please complete and return the journal topics you would like your child to write about this year.

If I have stamped your child's work with "Please complete for Mrs. Tyndall," this means that your child did not complete his/her work in class and that it should be finished at home and returned in Monday's mailbag. Thank you.

We are currently learning all about COLOURS, starting with colour words, and the Pete the Cat book "I Love My School Shoes" which explains colour mixing in a fun way. We will continue with colour mixing and Pete the Cat stories over the next few weeks. The children have started their first read and colour booklet called "I like my school shoes." We also completed our first graph, "What is your favourite colour?" Our favourite colour is green!

We have also started right into Phonics with the letter/sound "S." The popcorn (sight) words of the week are I and AM. I have sent them home for practise.

It would be wonderful if you could practise letter and sound recognition with your child at home. We are learning to recognize high-frequency words in the modeled writing each day. As well, it is important for your child to learn to print his/her name this year with a capital letter, followed by lower case letters. This is not going to happen overnight with my little JKs. It may take most of the year for some! Try making their name with play-dough, sugar on glue, or dot-to-dot on paper.

The children are also learning about working together cooperatively in Centres. We have played in the following centres: wooden letter games, patterns, magnetic letters and numbers, counting cards, Wedgits, dominoes, building toys, and dramatic play.

Curriculum night is September 15. The Kindergarten presentation will start at 5:30 in the Gym. We hope to see you then.

That's the news for this week! I'm looking forward to a terrific next week and a great year ahead!

Have a great weekend.