Week of November 27 - December 1

Dear families,

December already! Christmas is in the air! The children are already asking when Alfie the Elf will come to the classroom. I'm pretty sure he'll be there on Monday!

Last week we read "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," first with the children not seeing the pictures and imagining the events. Then, they retold the story to me with the pictures. We also re-read "Corduroy" and the children did a dot-to-dot activity and a counting activity. We also read "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" again and the children sequenced the story with pictures, retold the story, and coloured the colour words in the story.

For the nature/non-fiction part of learning about bears, the SKs read several features about Polar, Grizzly, Black and Panda bears, and categorized them under the headings CAN, HAVE, EAT and ARE. The SKs also wrote several words they knew that started with the letter sounds B,E,A,R and S, and the JKs helped me spell them on chart paper. They also completed a mini read-and-write CAN booklet. We'll finish our inquiry on What Animals do in the Winter next week, and the children will bring their folders home to show you! We'll focus on more numeracy activities next week (counting bears, rolling dice and colouring according to the number, and using our ten-frames).

We practised adding and subtracting with a ten-frame. A laminated 10-frame will be sent home for your child to practise. The children also completed their November calendars and wrote and drew "This is me in November."

We now have designated gym time each week! Please provide your child with running shoes (that stay at school) so that s/he can run safely in the gym.

On the Smartboard, we read Bob Books (on YouTube) together, and the children read copies in class. We also got 4 brand new sets of non-fiction levelled readers from Scholastic which I'm very excited about!

On Monday the children will help decorate our classroom for the holidays, and we'll start doing lots of fun literacy and numeracy activities about Santa, elves, and the Polar Bear Express! It's such an exciting time of year for the little ones.

Thank you so much to Elea's grandmother and dad who were our Mystery Readers this week.

The next Sharing Assembly will be on December 15. The children will be singing two holiday songs, and should dress in RED, WHITE and/or GREEN. Thank you! Santa or Elf hats are ok, too!

That's the news for this week. I hope you have a lovely weekend.