Happy New Year ! I hope everyone had a wonderful, restful holiday. We are ready to get started on a new and exciting 2012. We will be exploring the season of Winter with lots of themed snow centers, artic animals, and hibernating animals. All of these will be incorporated into our standards in Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies and Health. Please take some time to look at the Sign-up Genius that Carrie Stribling has sent out to see when you can participate in our Literacy Centers and Reading Parent.
In Math we will continue to study money by identifying the coins and their value and making fair trades involving combinations of coins. Soon we will set up centers for the students to "buy" classroom objects when they are accomplished at combining coins. You can help your student at home by having them buy a snack or other items around the house. Flipping coins and separating them by heads or tails is a fun activity also. Ask them to sing you the Money Song.
We will continue to work on building sentences with capitals, spaces and phonetic spelling. Soon we will be asking the children to write sentences at home with the words of the week. You can help them by asking them to think of a sentence using the word, count the number of words in the sentence, then ask them "What are the three things good writers do?" They should be able to tell you 1. start with a capital, 2. spaces between words, 3. end with punctuation. We have been working on this for a while now, and they know we are not concerned with correct spelling. Please let them sound out one word at a time and write what they hear. Ask them to read it to you and see if it makes sense. If they want to write more than one of course we would love that !
