A Few Important Notes..............

Yesterday report cards were sent home in your child's backpack. Please make sure you keep the report card and RETURN the empty envelope signed by you. We will be recycling these envelopes throughout the year.

Also, it is VERY important that you call the school office absence line when your child is out sick or not attending for the day. This will eliminate having the office call you to check on your child. Thanks.

Recess.....

Just a quick note about recess for the coming cold and snowy days and months ahead. Your child needs to be prepared with snow pants, boots, hats and gloves for recess during these winter months. They will be going outside if there is snow on the ground. If they do not have snow pants and/or boots they will be restricted from playing in the areas where there is snow. They will be required to play on the hard top area instead. Reason being that they may get wet and cold if they are not properly dressed for this occasion. It is strongly suggested that your child carry this winter gear to and from school in a separate bag labeled with his/her name.

Monthly Spotlight

Surprisingly enough, the month of December is passing quickly. We have been working on numbers to 20 in math. We have been focusing on base ten, place value. How many groups of ten and ones does a number have? We have been using place value rods and counting cubes to determine what this means? This is a very difficult concept to understand but we are getting there! We also continue to determine different ways to represent the quantity of numbers. We have been exploring tally marks by counting groups of objects in sets of five. Another focus in math is the concept of more, less or equal. We have been comparing numbers and determining if they are more than, less than or equal to another number.

In literacy, we continue to work in reading groups. How can we become good readers? We are making sure we point to words we read as a 1:1 match. What happens if we can't figure out a word? We are learning to sound it out and/or look at pictures to help us. Each time we read we review all of our sight words, focus on some difficult words in the story, complete some word study work, or even respond to questions through writing. Our letter focus this past month has been on v, w, x and y. We are almost through the lowercase alphabet! We have also been working on hearing beginning, middle and ending sounds. We have begun to segment and blend CVC words and have been using the smart board in whole group for our learning.