Family Newsletter

Dear Families,
Last week went by so fast!  I hope you all had a restful and nice Thanksgiving break with your friends and families.
As you saw inside your child's Friday folder this week, your child brought home information about online reading.  Your child got an account for raz-kids or Lexia.  I hope you will follow the instructions on the sheet and set up this online reading program at home.  Your child's online book portal is directly tied to his/her reading needs so all the books accessed can be read by your child successfully.  The children earn points as they read and move ahead.  It is a very engaging and motivating reading program.  We use it at school sometimes, but I also hope your child will read at home as well.  Let me know if you encounter technical problems or have questions about this.
Since we use this reading program at school too, I am asking that you please send in a set of head-phones for your child to use at school.  Thank you.

The week before Thanksgiving, we played Colonial School in our classroom.  The students sat in rows, we created quills, using feathers and tape, and instead of asking for a drink of water, we asked to go to the well!

Reading:
We are working on fluency in reading.  Last week, all the children received reader's theater scripts.  Throughout this unit, the students will learn how to attend to punctuation, read with expression and think about the story to make sense of their reading.  Stay tuned for more information about this. 

Writing:
We took a little break from our small moment stories to write some collaborative letters to our new pen-pals at Wake Robin. The students worked in small groups to compose a reply to the letters we received earlier.  We learned so much about letter writing and about our new friends' diverse backgrounds and experiences.  Ask your child to share with you.

Math:
First grade mathematicians continued working on 10-partners and partners to 20 while developing fluency and confidence. We also continued our work on story problems, a time when mathematicians show their thinking using representations, labels, equations and keys.  Last week, we primarily solved math problems relating to "how many more".  Here is an example:

Mrs McCormack baked 9 muffins.

Ms. Fisher baked 7 muffins.

How many more muffins did Mrs. McCormack bake?

Science:
We continued our scientific investigations into sound this past week too.  We went on a listening walk around the school and explored sound effects in movies.  We learned that sound is sometimes made by vibrations and that it has volume and pitch.  We even learned a new song about sound!

Before our Thanksgiving break, we also learned about pine needles and pine cones in our 4 Winds class. The students looked for attributes and sorted them accordingly.

Ms. Cristina and Ms. Cece's last days:
Ms. Cristina taught us about China and how to write Chinese on her last day.  It was very intersting and fun!  She is applying to graduate school now and she hope to earn her masters/PhD in education.  We wish all the best!

Ms. Cece ended her intership with us as well. We will miss her so much next semester but we learned that she will do her full-time student-teaching with Peter Lake on Synergy so she will remain at ABS! 
In January, we will welcome another student intern.  Her name is Ms. Z and she is currently a student at St. Michael's College.  She will be with us full-time, starting on January 2nd.