Friday, December 9, 2016

December 9, 2016 Newsletter

Dear Parents,

We have been started getting ready for our Nutcracker Performance on Thursday, December 22nd!  We have been learning the dance and have also been busy decorating our Nutcracker characters.  We are hoping to get into the auditorium next week to start practicing on stage!  We hope you can make it at 9:00am on the 22nd to enjoy all the hard work that has gone into it!  If possible, please have your child wear black bottoms and red tops on the day of the performance.

We are also really looking forward to going to the Nutcracker Ballet this Thursday.  Please be sure to have your child eat a nice, big breakfast that morning because we will not be eating lunch during normal school hours.  If your child attends the After School Program, please send a lunch for him/her to eat there.  We will be returning back to the school after our normal dismissal time but should be back in time for a 1:00pm dismissal.  If your child takes a bus home or will be picked up, it will be a little later than usual.  More information about the trip will be going home next week.  Chaperones should be at the school by 8:30am and will be riding on the bus with us.

The students have been busy writing in their journals, completing the “Good Night” class book, making Nutcracker projects, and practicing the letters and sounds we’ve been learning in Fundations.  We will be practicing our last two lowercase letters right after the holiday break and will then start working more with the uppercase letters.

We have also been reading and comparing several different versions of the Gingerbread Man story, including the Gingerbread Girl, Boy, Man, Ninja, and Baby.  We still have the Gingerbread Cowboy, Pirate, and Friends left to go!  We ended our busy week by reading “The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School” and then followed clues around the school that led us back to our classroom where we counted, compared, and discussed the gingerbread glyphs we made earlier this week.  The students have really enjoyed the gingerbread stories, projects, and hunting for clues too!

I sent home a paper today asking you to share holidays and traditions you have with your families.  I would love to be able to have students share some of them with their classmates and to be able to teach about as many of them as we can.  Please take a minute or two to complete the paper and send it back in next week.  Thanks in advance!

This certainly is a busy and exciting time of the year.  The children have been doing a wonderful job concentrating on their work and learning new things.  We wish you all luck as you finish preparing for the upcoming holidays!

Have a great weekend!

Melanie Duncan

PS… Don’t forget to send warm winter clothes (hats, gloves, mittens, etc.).  It certainly has been colder outside for recess!  Labeling all the items is helpful too.  The lost and found is piling up!

Each part of the gingerbread glyph represents something about the student who made it.  They used a red background if they like summer and a blue background if they like winter better.  They made the eyes match the color of their own eyes and the number of buttons represent their ages.  Students used blue noses if they have no pets and yellow if they do have pets.  Smiley faces represent liking cookies and sad faces represent not liking cookies.  We all have one thing in common...we all like to eat cookies!  Girls put bows on their heads and boys put them under their chins.  Students used straight lines to tell they had no siblings and wavy lines to tell they had siblings.  We enjoyed sorting ourselves into different categories while learning interesting facts about our classmates!  It ended up being a great math activity too and tied in nicely with our topic on counting, comparing,and classifying!

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