Week of December 5-9

Dear families,

I hope you are having a lovely weekend - snow today! The kids will love it! We've been teaching the children the Snow Clothes Song (tune is My Darling Clementine):

First the snowpants
Then the boots,
Then the scarf, and the hat
Then the coat and the zipper
And the mittens go on last!

To support the school-wide Hour of Code last week, we talked a lot about the order of things, and the "steps" to accomplish a task, for example:

How to get from the classroom to the Library
How to make a plaster glitter star
How to dress for a cold day

We finished our Dr. Seuss author study! The children's folders went home in Friday's mailbag. I know they will enjoy showing you all their work! They finished the sentence, "If Thing 1 and Thing 2 came to school..." (The Cat in the Hat); "To make the Grinch smile..." (How the Grinch Stole Christmas); and "I want to go to..." (Horton Hears a Who). The children also made their own Horton with paint, and know that, in Dr. Seuss' famous words, "A person's a person, no matter how small." Thank you Ella and Ruby for bring in their Fox in Sox books, to Catherine for sharing her Lorax book and to Megan T. who was our surprise Mystery Reader and read from her own Dr. Seuss collection. With our Reading Buddies, the children completed the sentence "If I Ran the Zoo" from the eponymous Dr. Seuss book, and drew an accompanying picture. They also wrote Truffalo word family words from Seuss' "Oh the Places You'll Go."

The words of this week were HAVE and SAW. The homework for this week is to do the Holiday Word Search and practice the December words. The Guided Reading Techniques we have learned about are: Eagle Eye, Stretchy Snake, Lips the Fish and Chunky Monkey. I sent a copy of these home in Friday's mailbag.

Thank you to William's dad who was our Mystery Reader this week!

We started talking about the holidays too this week! The excitement is in the air I think! The children made bead pattern candy canes. The SKs had to use three colours, the JKs two. The children were also surprised when Alfie the Elf of the Shelf landed on the North Pole of our classroom globe, and gave each child a backpack bell! The children have finished making their Elves. Next week we will make "Elf To Do Lists" and will continue our Holiday Centres: word presents, clapping the syllables in holiday words, and listening for holiday word ending sounds. In the computer lab the children have been learning to read SNOW words. More to come over the next few weeks!

That's my news for this week - I hope you have a lovely week!