Dear Families,

It’s great to be back with the children after a restful break.  We had a busy week filled with fun activities, particularly the children enjoyed our first two Winter Fridays.

Here are some highlights:
Language Arts:
We read several books and poems about winter.  We added a new poem to our “Poems and Songs” binders named Wouldn’t You?  The children drew some pretty amazing winter scenes and began writing about them.  Also each child shared his/her scene with the class, and everyone talked about their work and others’ work respectfully and enthusiastically. In Art class, Susie introduced the children to the work of Grandma Moses focusing particularly on winter scenes – a very nice way to complement our unit on winter. We are looking forward to writing poems about winter sometime next week.

Science
The frogs are back in the classroom!  The children were very excited to see them and have been observing their growth.  We have four frogs, three live in one habitat and the smallest had to be placed in a separate habitat because the other frogs were a bit too aggressive with it.  The children have expressed a desire to name the frogs which we will do next week.

First Grade Math
The children began working on a project about the calendar.  We began with the year by trying to figure out different ways to show the number 2008.  The children have been exploring the thousand, hundred, ten, and ones blocks and made different representations of 2008, including a smiley face using a thousand block for the nose, 10 hundred blocks for the smile, and 4 ones for each eye.  The children shared their work and everyone enjoyed seeing different ways to show 2008.

The Kindergarten group has been counting, counting, counting in many different ways.  Lynn will have more details in next week’s letter.

Puppies
The puppies from “Help Orphan Puppies” will be available to visit the classroom in about two weeks. I will keep you informed as soon as I know more.

Library
This week only library is scheduled for Monday at 2:00 and books should be returned at this time.

Calendars
If you have extra 2008 calendars (January – December) that you don’t plan to use, would you please donate them to the class.  I would like each child to have his/her own calendar – an effective way to learn months, days of the week, numbers, seasons, and more.  The first grade group is also using them for their calendar math project.  Thank you!

Please feel free to email me with any concerns, thoughts, and suggestions.  My hotmail address works best for me at the present time.

I wish you a peaceful week,

Liliana