Week of Nov 17

It was a jam packed week full of lots of laughter and experiences. We had a few safety presentations this week including Farm Safety and Bus Safety. For Bus Safety we actually got to ride on one of our yellow school busses while our driver, Ben, took us around the town! There was lots of exclamations about "Hey! my house is that way!" and "My sister goes that that school!"

We finished up our ABC bootcamp on Tuesday and celebrated by having a PJ and Movie party with Ms. Yvonne's class. This was a much anticipated celebration and I am so proud of all the students for working so diligently on recognizing the alphabet and letter sounds. As we continue practicing it will be extra important to move away from ABC order as words are not formatted that way. Shortly we will begin our UFLI reading program and combine our letter sound recognition with building CVC words. Books that support our in class learning will be coming home with your student either this week or next, if you are finding these books too easy, I encourage families to work on phonological awareness such as " take the word cat and replace the beginning sound with a "buh" what is the new word?" " What is the middle sound in the word dog?" Having a solid foundation in phonological awareness will help with encoding and decoding more complex words which will improve spelling and reading in higher grades.

We finished up our 5 senses unit by having a taste test event. Students tried salty pretzels, sweet gummy bears, sour lemons, and bitter dark chocolate. We then talked about some things can have two tastes, such as salt and vinegar chips, which taste both salty and sour. Everyone was surprised at how gross the dark chocolate was (95% with only 1 gram of sugar), except for Ms. Brookelyn who LOVES dark chocolate!

On Thursday it was EA appreciation day and we shared our love for Ms. Brookelyn who helps make our classroom run smoothly and supports all our students with her kind and caring nature! She appreciated all the love she received that day, and every day!

Finally we had the Terry Fox glow party and it was a HIT, 30 minutes of great music and fun props that made the black lights really stand out as we glowed about the gym.