Week of October 17-21

Dear families,

I hope you are having a relaxing Sunday.

Last week we continued learning about, identifying and making patterns with various manipulatives. The children also continued learning about Signs of fall. We are learning the poem "If I Were a Leaf" and re-told the story "Lionel in the Fall." The children continued "discovering" sight words on leaves by painting them fall colours (I pre-wrote the words on the leaves using a white crayon). They are reading and illustrating a little booklet with their Reading Buddies called "Signs of Fall" and are reading non-fiction books about fall. Due to Friday's rainy weather our Autumn Scavenger Hunt had to be postponed until (hopefully) tomorrow. Speaking of rain, please remember that your child's indoor shoes should stay at school. Crocs or slippers work well. Thank you!

The sight words of the week were THE and DO. Our Jolly Phonics Sounds of the week are P and N. We've finished our first set of the Jolly Phonics sounds, which are SATIPN. There are so many words we can make with just those 6 letters!

We also combined our learning with fun Halloween=themed activities. The children: made more patterns with orange, black, white and glow-in-the-dark beads; read Halloween books; helped graph, tally and write the number of different costumes we'll wear for the Parade,; wrote what they would be on Halloween for a class book; helped write Halloween words; played with Halloween concentration cards; learned the poem "Five Little Pumpkins" on the Smartboard; played with our "Haunted House' by counting and writing the number of objects in the house; traced dot-to-dot lines with "pumpkin doodle;" estimated the weight of and number of seeds in our class pumpkin. Next week we'll continue with fun literacy, science and numeracy Halloween activities. If you are sending in items for Halloween for your child's classmates, please be sure to send them in by Wednesday at the latest so the children have enough time to sort them in the bags. Thank you.

Last week the children participated in a Power of One presentation. Thank you Ms. Norton for organizing this awesome presentation! Thank you Alexandra for sharing her book "Arthur's Halloween" with us! Thank you Catherine's mom for being Mystery Reader! Some of the children's work was on the LKS Twitter feed!

Next week in Numeracy we will focus on the number FIVE and sequencing. We'll also weigh, open up, count the seeds, weigh the seeds, and then weigh our class pumpkin again. When you carve your own pumpkin at home don't miss the terrific opportunity to sort the seeds into groups of 10 an count them!

I hope you have a terrific week - eight more sleeps until Halloween!

Mrs. Tyndall