Dear Parents,
Happy New Year! We hope you all had a wonderful vacation & are rested and ready to get back into the swing of things! I am sending this e-mail a little earlier to help you prepare for the upcoming week-- it'll feel like a long one!
First of all, we wanted to thank everyone for all the help we received with the Nutcracker performance. The kids did a wonderful job and they all looked so cute! We had a great cast party afterward, thanks to all of you. Finally, a huge thanks to everyone for their generosity and thoughtfulness with all the wonderful gifts Michele & I received. We have been so touched by how giving this class is, and we appreciate it so much.
We have a pretty academic month ahead of us with no major breaks other than the observation of Martin Luther King's Birthday on the 17th.
We will start right in with a new letter-- Pp-- and a new word-- and. The Alphafriend's name is Pippa Pig. We will have centers all this month. Art projects will revolve around the theme of weather, especially snow! We will even start right back up this week with an Art Vista lesson on Wednesday. Thank you to Angie & Tammy for presenting this one.
Our sharing this week is toy in a bag to give the children a chance to show off all those favorite holiday gifts!
Red bags will go home on Wednesday, of course. Remember that from now on, the red bags will contain a journal component. Very specific directions about our expectations with the journal will be attached to the journal this week. Please read that letter and leave it in the red bag folder for your reference. Basically, your child will use the journal to respond to the book that's in the red bag. Children need to write at least one sentence about the book-- what they liked/didn't like, who their favorite character was, etc. We DO NOT want children to copy a sentence from the book or copy a sentence that you have written for them. This is their chance for developing writing skills, which will help their confidence when we take our first writing assessment in February. A sentence written: "I like the fune got" for "I like the funny goat." is great and is what is expected from them at this time. If you would like to go over spelling with them once they are done, you can pencil it in underneath their words and show them what the conventional spelling looks like. However, do not make them correct their writing at this time. We want to encourage them in their thinking before we start focusing on the mechanics.
I Love to Read calendars for December are now due. Please turn them in as soon as possible. It was obviously misprinted this month, so just do your best with making it work. Remember that you can always use any blank calendar to report your
child's minutes, or you can simply send an e-mail with how many minutes
your child read in the month. Thanks!You should be receiving the January calendar in this week's Wednesday envelope.
This Week's Activities/Helpers:
MONDAY: Centers (Laura & Megan) Sharing, Library
TUESDAY: Centers (Jamie & Manami), Sharing
WEDNESDAY: Art Vista, Red Bags/Wednesday Envelopes (Karla/Angie/Derek),
Computers (Margaret), Sharing
THURSDAY: Centers (Tammi & Derek) Sharing
FRIDAY: ZUMBA, Sharing
Upcoming Events:
1/5: Art Vista Lesson
1/17: No School: MLK Holiday
2/2: Field trip to CA Theater Center to see a play
Week of 2/20: No School: President's Week
