Hi everyone,
I hope you are all well and getting into the swing of the Holidays that will be quickly upon us. December is a busy month at school but a fun one. Its one of my favorite times of year!
Students will be learning Christmas vocabulary in French. We have started to look at different parts of a sentence. Focusing on upper case letters to start our sentences and finishing with a period. We have discussed that names and celebrations are also capitalized. We have also been playing with mixed up sentences and working together to put the words in the correct order. This is great practice for the kids, seeing that they are reading words over and over again aloud and starting to train their ears to the correct French sentence structures. This can be done at home with sentences from your child's books, if you want to work on it at home. Some students continue to need work on following a line of print, letter sizing and correct formation. I believe they simply need to slow down.
In Math students are almost finished on their unit representing number 0-20. We will move onto simple addition and subtraction up to 12. A students will also start to skip count by 2, 5 and 10. Feel free to practice booth at home.
Science and health students are learning about their 5 senses and body parts. In the next couple of week we will focus on taste and smell. I have a couple of fun experiments planned. We will take a closer look at our taste buds and the different areas of our tongue that we taste certain things.
In Social studies, we are finishing up the last bit of our community and will start our unit on rights and responsibilities. These concepts are often difficult for students to understand. The more conversation we have about them the better.
English students continue to review vowel sounds long and short. More work is needed with short vowel sounds. Our class will write a letter to Santa, focusing on using complete sentences.
We continue to work on our Christmas song "Christmas on Planet Earth" By Lennie Gallant. It is coming along well. We do need more practice with the verse. Our Christmas concert is on Dec 18th at St. Michaels church. For the concert we ask that our students dress in their sunday best. For our song we will all be holding tea light candles (that will be provided). We are also the finale. Please let me know if you are able to attend or not.
Our class will also be selling candy canes again this year. This is a tradition for my class. I will be looking for volunteers to sell candy canes before and after the concert. It would be great also if some can sell during the concert. Usually my husband does this, but this year we have Winnie so I am not sure how this will look. If you can volunteer please let me know.
Each year since I started teaching, I have sold candy oh grams and collected spare change with my class to raise money for those less fortunate. When in PEI, our class donated their money to the CBC turkey drive which was through the salvation army. Since coming to Calgary, my class has donated turkeys to the Calgary food bank and for the last 4 years have donated hundreds of turkeys to the Calgary drop in center given over 1000 people a Christmas dinner. In the past with some of the funds we also put together stocking with toothbrushes, shaving cream, shampoo and so on for those in need. We have bought transit passes as well seeing that most homeless are jailed because of these infractions. This year we are still coming up with a plan seeing that the concert is much later than usual and I am unsure if I can pull the turkeys off. Our class will be collecting spare change from now until the Christmas concert.
We have parent teachers interviews Thursday night and all day Friday. Don't forget to sign up for a time on conference manager. https://holyname.schoolsoft.com/login.jsf The scholastic book fair will be taking place during this time as well in the learning commons. Also Mattias in grade 5 will be collecting unwrapped toys to donate to the inn from the cold. These can also be dropped off in class if you want or during parent teacher interviews.
On Thursday Dec 5 we will have our first liturgy at 1pm. All is welcome to attend. Our second one will take place Dec 20, not sure of the time yet.
The last week of school before the holidays our class will be dressing up each day to make this LONG week more fun! This is optional, please participate if you wish.
Monday December 16- Christmas elves
Tuesday December 17- Christmas presents
Wednesday December 18- Santa, Mrs. Claus or a reindeer
Thursday December 19- Christmas trees
Friday December 20 - Angels
I was also hoping some parents would come in the last week and share their favorite Christmas stories and traditions with the class. If you are available the last week, let me know if you are interested.
Scholastics are Due Wednesady December 4. Let me know if I am to keep them as presents.
Also if you have any Christmas decorations your willing to part with our class would gladly add it to our collect. I seem to have lost a box when I was on my mat leave!
A lot of info here i think that's all for now.
