We also had our first trip to the Laurel's Nursing Home and both the residents and students loved it! Our students were amazing with the residents and definitely brightened up their day! We started off by singing Christmas/Holiday songs and the residents joined in with us. Students then rotated through different stations where they interacted with the residents. The stations were holiday painting, Christmas card making, holiday pattern block puzzles, holiday coloring pages, and holiday poke art. It was so much fun watching the students interact with the residents and they are excited and ready to go back! We will go back February 13th and April 10th.
***Please send in a baby picture of your child by next Tuesday (Dec 5th). We are going to use it for our holiday door decoration. We will not cut it and will return it safely when we are done.
***Please save and send in your quart sized half & half cartons or any other cartons similar to this size for our gingerbread houses. We need 21 by December 19th! 😁 See picture below.
December 5th: PAJAMA DAY! We have been learning about Sinterklaas and Christmas in the Netherlands this week and Sinterklaas visits children on December 5th. We are going to put our shoes in the hallway with carrots and hay in them (what the children in The Netherlands do) and hope that Sinterklaas leaves us a treat! 😉 We thought it would be fun to have a pajama day paired with this. Your child may wear their pajamas to school but please have them still wear their tennis shoes. No stuffed animals (I have already had kids ask so I am sure they will ask you too haha)
December 19th 1:00 PM Gingerbread Houses: Come and decorate a gingerbread house with your child! We will ask for supplies as we get closer to the date.
Math:
The main math concepts we worked on this week are "one more, one less", basic addition, and counting on. We added a few new centers to our math workshop this week with two being "Race to 20" and "Race to 50." These games have started circulating home this week in our "take home math game bags." These games work on counting on and addition. Your child should be able to explain to you how to play. :) We are also really working on number writing! Reversals are still very common developmentally at this point but we are working as hard as we can in the classroom on this. Whenever you see reversals at home, just ask them to flip it around and fix it. I have also been completing the state based mid-year math assessments to see where we students are and what we need to focus on for the second half of the year.
Literacy:
We have seen so much progress with the students and their knowledge of their letters, sounds, sight words, and phonetic spelling! They are continuing to rotate through their reader's workshop centers that practice all of these things. After the holiday break, we will start focusing heavily on sight words. We will learn a few sight words a week and they will start receiving mini-books for each sight word to bring home to practice reading. These books really help students who haven't begun reading yet and help build confidence for those who are already reading. Look for these in the weeks to come! ***Please have your child make a book box to keep all of these in if they haven't already. This is a great box to pull from when they need to read a book on their own!
Thematic:
This week during thematic centers we learned about Christmas in the Netherlands! We learned all about Sinterklaas and talked about the differences between Christmas in the Netherlands and Christmas in the USA. The students rotated through three different stations to learn more about Sinterklaas and The Netherlands. They made a headband and had to match up Christmas pictures to the correct word, they illustrated a book with facts, and they used their creative side to make their own "klompen." You can see these hung in the hallway. :)
Science:
During our science time, we are focusing on the scientific method and introducing all of the steps to the students. Today, our Sci-Fri experiment was making snowflake crystals using Borax! Each table got to make one snowflake as a team out of pipe cleaners and then we put the snowflake in a mixture of boiling water and Borax. We will observe them today and when we come back to school on Monday to see if the crystal has formed on the pipe cleaners!
Have a great weekend!
Love,
Mrs. James
No comments:
Post a Comment