December News

Happy New Year!  We have been so busy in room 7!  The days are flying by!  Before vacation we had been reading a lot of holiday and winter stories.  One of my favorites is The Mitten by Jan Brett (we discovered many of her books in our class too!)  We did a fun activity where the kids were graphing the animals (to see who would make it to the top first!)

We have learned how to print all the lowercase letters and will be moving on to the uppercase letters shortly. The children have been working hard to print their names in lowercase letters as well.  Now that all the letter sounds have been introduced, we are beginning to segment and blend sounds together.  We have been working on "tapping" out sounds in words with our fingers.  Ask your child to show you. Say a CVC (consonant vowel consonant) word for him/her and you can see how we've been segmenting each sound in the word.  This is an activity you can do in the car, in the bathtub, or before bed time!

In math we are beginning a unit on measurement.  We will be measuring using a lot of "nonstandard" units such as cubes, bears, blocks and so on.  The children have been doing a great job on the teen numbers too!  We have been talking about the numbers in the tens and ones columns (place value).  We've been using base ten blocks to help us (rods and cubes).  This can be a tricky concept.

As the weather gets colder please remember to send a hat and mittens with your child and label anything that can come off.

Hopefully you received the yellow note about pajama day on Friday, Jan 9th.  How exciting to be the first class to get 10 tokens in the lunch room!  Good job!  Of course this is optional, if your child doesn't feel comfortable wearing or bringing pjs to school.