Week of September 5-9

Dear families,

The first week of school is over already! The children have done an amazing job learning classroom rules and routines and there have been very few tears! Here is just some of the learning the children (especially the little JKs!) did last week. They learned how to:

- get to school - some learned to board and exit a school bus
- manoeuver between the big people and the little people to find a classroom
- line up
- find their cubby and hook in the cubby room
- find their name on a table
- find space in a room full of other little beings - for some this may have been the largest group of children (32!) they have ever been with!
- the names of adults they have never seen before
- where the washroom is
- raise their hand and put their finger on their lips when they want a turn on the carpet
- sit "criss cross apple sauce"
- move carefully and quietly from one centre to another
- share toys and materials (this is ongoing!)
- follow each other in a line to go upstairs to the Library and Computer Lab
- open and close back packs
- read "snack 1" and "snack 2"
- new games
- a new poem
- new songs
- make new friends!

Just think of all those little things we need to learn to be more independent! My SKs are being awesome role models to the JKs. Well done!!

Our first read-aloud was "How Full is your Bucket" for kids. The children helped me put ideas on the "bucket filling" or "bucket dipping" side of chart paper. We have a red classroom bucket that we'll fill with pom poms when the children do positive things.

In Friday's mail bag there was a lot of important paper work to be completed. This is time sensitive so please return it by MONDAY. Thank you.

The first of our monthly words was sent home too ("August/September Words"). Please put it on the fridge or in your child's room so s/he can practice them at home. 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, Treo, Lego, dominoes, building toys, and dramatic play.

The first Scholastic order is due on September 22. Thank you for supporting Scholastic!

Our very first Mystery Reader was Nathalie, a former student of mine. Nathalie read a funny Mo Willems book. We will be starting a Mo Willems author study next week! If you don't know his books, he wrote "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus" and many other funny stories that kids love. If you would like to be a Mystery Reader, please contact our Grade Parent Tiffany.

This year we are doing Reading Buddies with Ms. Sunde's Grade 3/4 class. We will meet for the first time next week!

The words of the week are I and AM. We add two new words to our word wall each week. The children completed their first "This is Me" work. We do these each month (with the SKs writing about their picture). It's so amazing to see the childrens' progress from month to month! They also practised tracing lower and upper case letters. Next week we will start the Snuggle Up book program and will send home journals for the SKs.

I hope you are having a wonderful weekend. My family and I went up north for the day and today we saw the world premiere of "Jane" at the TIFF, a documentary about Jane Goodall. To our surprise and delight, Dr. Goodall was in the audience and spoke about her life after the film. It inspired me to do an inquiry on monkeys (fiction and non-fiction) with my little "monkies!" :)

I'm looking forward to seeing all the kids' happy little faces tomorrow!