Week of October 22-26

Dear families,

What a busy week this was and what an exciting time of the year this is as Halloween approaches! This is what your children were doing this week:

The "popcorn" words of the week were ARE and AT. The letter sound was Kk. So far we have done Ss Aa Tt Ii Pp Nn Cc and Kk.

We made a Halloween folder and once our literacy, numeracy and art activities are done they will be sent home with your child in his/her Halloween folder. So far we played match-up memory games with Halloween pictures, read words with "witchy" fingers, made a class book called "What Will You Be?", the children are learning how to read Halloween words and draw Halloween pictures, we made a pumpkin booklet with our Reading Buddies, learned two "I'm a Little Pumpkin" songs, painted and cut our pieces to make a paper pumpkin, practised finding the beginning and ending sounds of Halloween words, put pictures of pumpkin carving steps and pumpkin growth steps in the correct order, counted pumpkins seeds, made a paper ghost, made a Halloween pattern, predicted how many seeds would be in our class pumpkin, and finally observed and wrote about our class pumpkin. Finally, we all predicted whether our little pumpkin would sink or float (most kids thought it would sink) and discovered that pumpkins float! We watched a little Kindergarten-level video about buoyancy and displacement on the Smartboard. Next week we'll open up the pumpkin and count the seeds. We'll also do a lot more fun Halloween learning centres.

We also did the "Observation" part of our Apple Science Experiment - the children observed that the apple slices that were in salt, vinegar, air, and oil didn't get moldy and rotten, but the apple slice in water did. We talked about how people preserve food for eating in the winter using salt, vinegar, air and oil.

This week the children also completed October's calendar and their "This is me in October" writing and picture. good job! I can see so much development already in the Juniors and Seniors!

The next Scholastic order is due on November 15. There will be one more order before Christmas.

Thank you so much to Reina's mom and Elise's sister who were Mystery Readers! Thank you as well to Simonne and Estella's mom and Elise's mom who helped with Pizza Lunch today! Thank you to Ayla who shared her wonderful book about a class trip to a pumpkin patch!

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