Family Newsletter

Dear Families,
Happy New Year and welcome back to school!
Our two days together last week went by fast.  I am sure your children came home tired, but I also hope they came home happy to be back at school again.  I know my own children were exhausted:)

I would like to welcome Ms. Z to our classroom.  Ms Z. is a student at St. Michael's College and she will do her teacher internship with us until April vacation.  She will be with us every day and she will take on more responsibilities as time progresses.  Eventually, she will conduct her solo week, a time when she plans and leads all the lessons in our classroom.  More information will follow.  Ms. Z will also sub for me when I have meetings, or when I need to do assessments.  I will start next week, when I will do the reading assessments for accuracy, comprehension and fluency.  Report cards are scheduled to go home with the students on Friday, January 24th.

Literacy:
We started a new unit in reading and writing.  We will learn about non-fiction books and non-fiction writing in the next few weeks.  Throughout this unit, the students are encouraged to make connections between reading and writing.  In other words, they are encouraged to read non-fiction books for new information and content knowledge acquisition.  They are also encouraged to read non-fiction books as a way to understand the different text features of these types of books.  For example, they will search for headings, captions, glossaries and labels.  They will learn to identify table of contents, photographs and indexes.  The ultimate goal is then to apply these features to their own writing, which will be in the form of an "All About" book first, and later animal research, which this year will focus upon rainforest animals.  More information will follow.

Last week, we started with a scavenger hunt using the books written by the author Gail Gibbons. The students were partnered up and searched through many books together.  We started to collect non-fiction features on our class anchor chart.  They did an amazing job!

Mindfulness:
Last week, the students also brought home a small jar of playdough.  We use playdough in our peace corner, our take a break space, in the classroom.  I hope that your child might want to create a mindfulness corner/space at home too.  Periodically, I will send home calming tools we use in our classroom for students to try at home.  Ask your child to explain to you what the purpose is of these mindfulness tools and how they help us learn at school.

Engineering and Creativity:
Ms Rogers joined Harmony House on Friday to share some of the amazing arcade games her groups had created using recyclable materials.  Thank you for sharing these projects! Here are some pictures:

New Year's Resolutions and Friday Workshops:
We used SeeSaw to create New Year's Resolutions for school and home.  I hope you will have a chance to see them and comment on their goals for the new year.

We created indoor snow for our Friday workshop since we could not go outside in the slush and ice.  The recipe simply calls for 3 cups of baking soda and 1/2 cup of conditioner, if you would like to create it at home.

Have a great weekend!
Best,
Maria