Hi Families-

If you missed the paper copy of the newsletter in the folder, I've included it here. Also you can find the lastest copy of the The Core, Mr. T's newsletter linked to the Orchard site. Enjoy the long weekend!

September 4, 2015

Dear Room 35 Families,

It was a pleasure talking with many of you last night at Curriculum Night.  For those of you who weren’t able to make it, the packet we went over is in folders and I also enclosed the “parent suggestion” page that was accidentally left   This week we’ve continued to be mindful of our classroom rules- have a calm body, treat others with kindness and take care of our school.  The children are especially enjoying the morning movement breaks we do to get up and stretch after our meeting.  You can try asking your child about “winning the bronze medal” (aka motivated running in place) or “Super Scooper with Maximo” (slow and controlled breathing with big arm movements).  One thing you can do to assist your child with organization is ask them to explain their check-in routine to you.  It should include:

1. take their lunch/snack pack out of their backpack for easy access and place both in their cubby.
2. identify that they are here by placing their name tag by the appropriate lunch choice (home, main menu, sandwich, or salad bar)
3. understand the morning message and complete the job
4. find a table activity.

Literacy Learning

This week we completed our first class made book- a re-write of the traditional story/song “Down By The Bay”.  The children worked in pairs to come up with a rhyme that they could illustrate to make a page in the book.  We continued to work on our “All About Me” books which I think you will really enjoy reading when they come home.  Thursday’s page asked the children to identify something they didn’t know how to do when they were a baby, something they are really good at now, and what they imagine themselves doing when they are a grown-up,  Have I peaked your interest?  We’ve also worked on using handwriting lines, writing names with the first letter upper case and the rest lower, sequencing pictures, and had lots of fun with the story Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.  Be sure to look for the little paper book Farm Friends that your child put together and practiced reading.  Another one to save at home for rereading!

Math Matters

Predicting and creating patterns, identifying characteristics for sorting writing numbers to ten, and accurate counting were all skills that we worked on in math this week.  The first 10-15 minutes of math each day consists of a routine called Number Corner in which we make pattern predictions using the calendar, keep track of the days in school, visualize quantities on five and ten frames and practice forward and backward counting.  You might try asking your child “now that you’ve been in school for nine days, how many more dots do you need to fill the ten frame?”.  When you think about it, there’s a lot of computation going on in a very visual and relavent way!

Important Reminders

1. Please help your child complete the homework from last week- the collage page for our class book.
2. If  you haven’t yet signed up to be listed in the school directory, visit the PTO website and click on the directory form tab to do so.
3. There is no school on Monday for Labor Day.  
4. Homework this week is an upper and lower case letter match page.  Do not expect your child to know them all! We are working on it. Just talking about the fact that there is an upper and lowercase way to write every letter is helpful.  

Have a great weekend,