Winter Traditions Week Begins!

We were thrilled to begin our wonderful week of Winter Traditions!  Read on to learn more about our week in SK P217...

Language

     Printing This week we practiced the letter Bb.  We worked on making our letter B the right way! For upper case B, start at the sky, pulling straight down to the grass, lift and back up to the sky for a curve to the red fence and then a curve to the grass.  For lower case b, start at the sky, pull straight down to the grass, push up to the red fence and circle down to the grass.  Practice writing words that start with B at home!
     Journals  For journals we wrote about gingerbread houses!  First we brainstormed as a whole class what kind of candy we would want on our gingerbread house and came up with all kinds of yummy ideas!  Then friends picked their favorite to write about.  Ask your SK'er what their gingerbread house is made of!
     Daily 5   Star Words this week :  "you" and "have"  Please add these to the list and have your SK'er be practicing them at home!  A great activity is to be "star word detectives", finding star words  in books they are already reading!  We have been busy doing that here at school!
                   Word Families:  We are working with and reviewing am, ap, at, it, and ig.   Continue making words at home and practicing rhyming with different word family words.  We will be introducing new word families soon.
                   Book Shopping:  We shopped for new books this week!  We also talked about and reviewed what to do when we come to a word we don't know.  Ask your SK'er what to do!  (Hint: stretch out the sounds, use the picture (read the picture) or skip the word.)  Practice these strategies at home when reading with your child.   
                  Writing: We have been working really hard within our Daily 5 lessons and independent work to become even better writers!  Our SK friends have been writing using more sentences and star words!  We even have had some wonderful poems and stories come out of our "work on writing" station this week!  Bravo friends!!  Keep up the good writing work!





Math
We covered a lot of math skills this week and played some fun games while doing it!  Friends graphed coins, practiced place value and played a fun game of spin and graph, using reindeer!  We also enjoyed the Train Game again this week (rolling dice in order to add or subtract train cars from our track!)
Another skill we worked on was addition using dice.  Friends worked in pairs with 2 and 3 dice.  Using unifix cubes and a game board, each child took turns rolling the dice, adding up the numbers and then covering the answer on their game board.  It was great fun and even had a wonderful snowman theme to go along with it!





Science
As a class, we have decided to save our Know/Wonder/Learn and study snow for our next unit of science study.  However, with our "snowless" season so far, our friends have chosen to continue their exploration of gingerbread!  We read books, wrote about gingerbread houses and even made decorated our imagination station to look like a gingerbread house!  Coming up next week we'll be incorporating taste into our theme too!  (And we are all hoping for snow soon so we can begin some great observations, including a visit to our SK sugar maple tree!)





Reminders:

    Please remember to send warm winter gear to school every day!  As we are getting ready for going outside we are asking our friends to put on their hats, mittens/gloves and scarves. We never know what the temperature will be at recess time and we want everyone prepared!
Thank you!

Coming Up Next

-Mitten Project:   We are collecting new hats and mittens, scarves and gloves, to give to Milwaukee friends without warm clothes.  Thank you for bringing in what you can share with our community!  

-Holiday Sing:  We are busily getting ready for our Holiday Sing coming up on December 19th.  There is a special note in Friday Folders this week with some important information regarding the sing.  We are looking forward to seeing all of you!

-PJ Day:  All of SK will be having a PJ Day next Friday, December 14th.  Please refer to the note in your child's Friday Folder for more information!


- Show and Share: We have completed our first week of our new show and share rotation.  Thank you to those friends who shared their winter traditions with us this week.   It has been quite delightful!  We are looking forward to next week's show and shares!  Please let us know if you have any questions.

- Ice Skating: Please see the letter in your SKer's Friday Folder regarding our upcoming, and very exciting, ice skating unit in P.E.!