Welcome back! Thank you as always to our valued volunteers.
It was great to hear so many of your lovely holiday stories and nice to see the kids back in the classroom. We had a good week, a little loud for a few days as we all settled back into the routines but good spirits and genuine happiness in the kids to see each other again. They are a good group and are maturing and progressing well as the year goes on! You will have a chance to come for an interview in February (everyone will) but only the JK 's will be receiving a report card (the JK Summary will be prepared and sent home on February 5). At Lambton we use an online interview booking site where you can see all teacher schedules in case you need to coordinate sibling interviews. It will be open to parents to sign in on February 1 and spots will be available over the week February 8 - 12. Your parent access code will be emailed to you closer to the date however; in the event you already know you will be away during interview week, let me know so that I can look at alternate dates for you.
Please LABEL your child's belongings. With our cold snap and allllllll the clothing that the children wear to be comfortable during outdoor play, we had some difficulty matching up children to belongings! Many of the kids had NO idea what was theirs, especially when there were multiple pairs of the same thing all in the tight quarters of our coatroom! Mitts and boots are easily swapped and even snowpants were muddled and worn by the wrong students as there were no names on the clothing for us to use to sort them out! While the children are learning to care for their belongings, hang their clothes on their hooks and keep their cubby area tidy, it is a small, crowded space where things are easily knocked to the floor or buried under your neighbour's pile!
The children brought home their January Scholastic orders on Friday. If you would like to make a purchase this month please return your form with a cheque (no cash please) on Monday, January 11.
Several children also took home a "Good News Story" about their child on Friday. This is a small
postcard printed by the TDSB which I am using to let you know some of the great things we see,
small or large, in the classroom each week. It is impossible at pick up and drop off times to relay all of these things but great to be able to share them with you, so I will be sending approximately five a week home. Keep an eye out for one in your child's Friday bag!
We are beginning a unit on measurement next week in math and will have all kinds of tools available for the children to experiment with over the next few weeks. The primary grades focus on non-standard measurement as well as introducing the idea of standard; meaning that the children will measure with their hands, feet, cubes etc as well as rulers and meter sticks. We also have a trundle wheel I purchased last year which they absolutely LOVE to walk around the school with! If you have no older children you may not realize that the math strands throughout the grades stay the same while the expectations change according to age/skill so the students will do some of the same things throughout the grades with ever increasing levels of difficulty and proficiency expected.
Our word wall now has 24 of the most common sight words, 29 names, colour words, days of the
week and months of the year; which many of our students can read independently. Woohoo! Every few weeks I introduce 3 new words which we practise every morning in our morning message as well as reviewing the old words by having the children fill them in. This is called a "cloze" activity, meaning the children use the context of the sentence to fill in the correct sight word (words they know how to spell using memory). These are important ways to practise and develop reading skills that the children don't even realize are intended to teach them to read! We write each day but don't expect the level of your child's writing to be at the level of their reading abilities. In primary grades reading is always ahead of writing as writing requires that much more memory and many more skills such as fine motor development, spacing and punctuation. Keep cheering them on and practising with their small readers to develop skill and confidence. Our small classroom reader program begins again on Tuesday this week.
This week:
Monday - Music PM
Tuesday - Mystery Reader PM
Wednesday - Day 5 Lib/IT
Thursday -
Friday- Reading Buddies AM, Mystery Reader AM, Day 2 Lib/IT PM
Have a great week!
Ms I
