Welcome to 2011!

Thursday = A Friday = B

Happy New Year in room 111! Our first day of the new year together was wonderful! It was so great to have all of my friends back. They were ready to rock this morning and stayed energized all day! We welcomed our new friend, Kassidy, today. Everyone was so loving and kind to her. I was very proud of each one of them. We did a lot of journaling about our winter break. It was so fun to hear about all of their adventures and treasures! It sounds like Pillow Pets, DS's and Snuggies were hot items this year! Way to go.

Our story today was an old Ukrainian folktale called, The Mitten. Your child listened to the story, used visualization to imagine the story, learned several new vocabulary words such as "trudged" and worked on sequencing events in this old tale. Tonight they are bringing home their yellow mitten with an assignment on the front. They should be able to use their mitten and the character squares inside of it to re-tell the story. The concept of re-telling is crucial improving your child's reading comprehension! Please encourage them to re-tell or summarize the important events in all the stories they read with you at home. During their re-tell tonight, encourage them to include details about the boy, Ivan, in our story.

Ask:
What was Ivan doing when he lost his mitten?
Where did Ivan lose his mitten?
How do you think Ivan felt when he lost his favorite mitten? Why do you think that?
Why did the mouse tell the owl that he could come in if he had good manners?

Questions like this will help your child remember important events from this story and strengthens their comprehension skills, which will help them a great deal in the upcoming semester.

In math today we did lots of review to make sure our brains hadn't turned too mushy over break! I am happy to report that we were all sharp as tacks! We worked on our January calendar and used a number chart to solve big addition problems
(92 + 8 = ?).

This afternoon we worked on making fancy snowflakes and it took some muscle power! We haven't unveiled our creations yet, but tomorrow we will see the result of our hard work.

Welcome back! I am so excited for this semester with your child. As always, let me know if you ever have any questions or if you need anything. Happy New Year!