Hello December!

 Happy December! Looking forward to all the fun and excitement this month brings! In class, the students are learning French Christmas vocabulary. We have started writing our booklets on what you can find in Santa's sac and have been playing lots of games that build our French vocabulary. We are learning what makes a sentence and starting to pay closer attention to the words we hear in a sentence. Often, kids mistake words that have more than one syllable as being two words. You can play word games with your child at home to help them recognize parts of a sentence by saying a sentence, then repeat it by leaving off the last word. Have your child tell you the word that is missing, keep doing this until they have to repeat the whole sentence back to you. ( I like to eat chocolate, I like to eat, I like to, I like , I) If they are able to write out the sentence this is also good practice. When writing and reading sentences in class we have been 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. Some students continue to need work on following a line of print, letter sizing and correct letter formation. I believe they simply need to slow down and review their work. 

We will be taking the next couple of weeks to finish up units and review what we have learned so far. I hope to start some reading evaluations before January so please continue to practice their sight words, colored reading lists. If you have lost the sheets you can find them on google classroom. 

In Math, I will start simple addition/subtraction up to 12. This unit will continue after Christmas. Students will start to count by 2, 5 and 10 in French. Students should be able to count by 2 up to 50, count by 5 up to 100 and to count by 10 up to 100 in French. It would be great practice if you could start this at home to give them a head start. We continue to work on using base 10 blocks to represent numbers and have made progress identifying which numbers are bigger, which number represents the tens place and ones place. 

Our science unit is coming to an end. In the next couple of weeks we will finish our sight section and explore optical illusions and learn about Helen Keller. 

In English, we have started our Christmas around the world unit. The students are having so much fun learning about Christmas traditions around the world. So far we have visited New York City, Mexico and today we went to France. We will visit Italy, Sweden, Germany, China, Canada, Australia and England. With each trip they learn about the traditions, special food or treats they get on Christmas as well as how to say Merry Christmas in the language spoken there. We will discuss the differences and similarities of our own holiday traditions. 

I was in the library one day looking for a book and came across a class set of knitting needles. I took them and walked back to class with the excellent idea of teaching our grade ones to knit a scarf. My plan was to knit one for someone in need. They have other ideas, but if we are good we will attempt to make 2! Could you please send in a ball of yarn, ideally light to medium weight size 4 or 5 will work the best. Wish me luck!

At our staff meeting they discussed online learning from Jan 4th- 8th. Please let me know if you may not have access to a device for that week or internet and we can make a plan for you and your child. All students are expected to attend and attendance will be taken. We will be having classes over zoom and smaller group sessions will take place. Once we learn more I will let you know. 

Please continue to practice our Christmas song when you can at home. We will be filming it soon to put together for the Christmas concert. The last week of school we usually dress up each day as something different. Not sure what order we will go in yet but I thought I would give you a heads up if your child wants to participate and you can prepare, Santa /Mrs. Claus or reindeer, Christmas trees, Christmas presents,  Christmas elves. We do not have school on Friday Dec 18. We will have our Christmas celebration on Thursday Dec 17. I will give more details closer to the date. 

That's all I can think of at the moment. I hope you are all well and healthy. Stay safe. Have a great week end!