Dear Parents,
Wow! What a big week we've had. Trips "Around the World", Gingerbread House building, lots of fun at our Holiday Party, and a final ride on The Polar Express. Thanks so much to our great room Moms for all of their planning and to those who came to help out. The children were very excited to enjoy special activities, snacks, treats, and time spent celebrating the holidays together. Mrs. Poirier and I send a big "THANK YOU" for the generous gift cards we received from the whole class along with personalized cups and note paper. We will certainly enjoy our shopping spree during those after holiday sales. We hope the children's gingerbread houses made it home in one piece. They had lots of fun making them.
In January, we'll be starting a unit on Winter. This will include the world in winter, weather, arctic animals and Eskimos, as well as fiction and non-fiction winter books. Please check out a great web-site at www.janbrett.com. Jan Brett has written many wonderful winter children's books and she has a fun web-site with activities available.
In Phonics, the second half of the year will be spent working with consonant sounds and making sure that students can discriminate between sounds and use the sounds to blend words in reading and writing. By now, everyone should be able to identify all capital and lowercase letters and produce the sound that each letter makes. Our letter sorts will now begin to ask them to discriminate between two sounds and sort pictures accordingly. We will also blend words containing a consonant-vowel-consonant. Please keep working on those sight words and helping your child to "sound-out" what they hear in words.
In math, we will have a week of "Winter Math". It will include some fun snowball activities that will practice counting and adding skills. Then we will work with numbers larger than 10. The 100th day of school is coming up in January. That will be a big celebration day for us and include many special activities to count to 100.
I hope that all of you and your families have a wonderful holiday season. Enjoy some extra time with your child. I'll see you in 2012. Students return to school on 1/10.
Sincerely,
Denise Porter
