Another Great Week...

This coming week we are going into Unit 3 of Reading Street and will be reading "Little Panda."  We will be working on two letters and their associated sounds: Nn and Bb.  The letter Bb is a short sound; therefore, please do not have your children add the "uh" sound.  In addition, we will have three new sight words: she, me, with.  We will also be continuing to work with our other sight words and using them in writing sentences.  Please encourage your child to be writing at home on their days off.  We love to see what your child does on their day off and they can bring their writing into class and share.  In our centers we are working with writing, math, art, and reading.  The children are able to view and browse through various holiday books and choose their favorite, in the math center children are exploring 2-D and 3-D shapes, the art center the children are working on creative thinking with various items, and finally the writing center we will be working on writing about the holidays!

In math, we will work on two new 3-D shapes.  We will work on the cone and the cylinder.  The children are required to identify these two 3-D shapes for the report card.  The cone is typically an easy one to remember because of ice cream and a party hat.  The cylinder is harder for the children because the children do not use this shape or have experience.  The children will work with all the 3-D shapes and explore them in the way they move, look, and other properties.  In addition, we are also reviewing 2-D shapes and the similarities and differences of 2-D and 3-D.

Finally, we are planning the "Winter Celebration" for the children.  The celebration will be held on Thursday the 22nd and Friday the 23rd at 1:45.  We are asking families not to send in items unless asked too.  This is important as we do have allergies in the classroom and we want to make sure we are able to include everyone and not to exclude them.  We will be sending out more information in the coming week!  We appreciate your patience and your help as we plan a great celebration for the children.

Week 3...Looks Like Fun...

This week we will continue to work on letter identification of letters Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, and Jj. The children are doing pretty well with identification, but some still need to continue to work on identification. We will also continue to work with the words I and am. You may want to put these on flash cards and practice them with your child. Please remember to mix up the order or you can hide them throughout your house and have your child go on a hunt or if you have magnetic letters you can have your child practice building the word on the refridgerator (a cookie sheet works well too). In addition, please continue to work on name writing with your child. This is what we will be focusing on during our writing time. In math, we will work on the vocabulary word sort. Children will begin to focus on sorting objects into groups. At this time children only need to be able to sort by one attribute (color, shape, size, etc. and be able to explain how they sorted.

This past Friday the yellow group had their first "Fantastic Fun Friday" and the Blue group will have theirs this week. On Fridays children will experience Phys. Education, Art, or Music class taught by Miss Todd or myself (luckily between the two of us we are pretty well off in these areas). While the children are experiencing this type of learning, the other teachers will be assessing children on various skills of the week. This allows for us to make better decisions about how to teach your child. This past week we worked on Art and color mixing. We learned primary colors and explored how colors mix. The children posed a lot of great questions and had some great thinking about what would happen, which allows us to tie into our science curriculum.