Week of January 21-25

Dear families,

I hope you are enjoying this beautiful winter weekend. Here is an update about our classroom activities:

The letter sound of the week was Bb and the sight words of the week were HAS and WANT. Thank you so much to Emma's mom who was our Mystery Reader and to Casey's mom who helped with Friday's pizza lunch!

The children continued to practise graphing and tallying, as well as measuring classroom objects using standard and non-standard tools. They also played in our Weights and Measures centre. The SKs enjoyed helping the JKS with these activities. The children measured the height and width of penguin drawings with cubes, and compared how tall they are with various kinds of penguins. Providing your child with measuring tape or a ruler at home will encourage him/her to develop these important skills.


The children put goldfish crackers on penguin pictures, saying the letter (JK) and letter sound (SK) as they did. They also coloured upper and lower case letters in a penguin pictures to practice their letters and sounds. Their penguin folders went home in Friday's mail bag.

With snow finally on the ground, it was time to start a book study of "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats. This Caldicott award-winning book is excellent for developing children's re-tell skills and developing text-to-self comprehension. With their reading buddies, the kids made a 3-D pop-up setting of the story to encourage re-telling, and started a text-to-self activity, relating tyhe main character Peter's experiences to their own.

We are also continuing our daily mindful meditation practices and yoga (this week it was Pedro the Penguin). If you Google search "mindful meditation for kids" your child can practice this at home, too. It's the one with the picture of the meditating monkey :)

Mila brought in jello cups for all her classmates (January's show-and-tell item is "my favourite food!) and we watched a little video on how jello/gelatin is made. Te kids were very interested about gummy bears being made from gelatin!

The next Scholastic order is due on February 8. Books and phonics sets make nice Valentine's Day gifts!

Next week will be our Scientist-in-the-Classroom visit on "Marvelous Machines" and we will also start a new inquiry on Arctic animals. Brrr!

That's the news for the week. Unfortunately I have come down with the chest infection that has been going around (and around!) our classroom, but I hope February is a healthier month! Only about 7 weeks until the first day of Spring!