Everything about school

Class Allergies

I thought I would send an update about allergies as I now know more about the people in our class. 
There is a tree nut allergy in the class. This does not include peanuts so we are a class that welcomes peanuts, and peanut butter. Please no hazelnuts (Nutella), walnuts, almonds, pistachios, pecans etc. While coconut has "nut" in the name, I have recently learned that it is a fruit!


School!

In class this week we have been sharing fiction and non-fiction books about school to build vocabulary and also to share ideas about different schools. Out of one class discussion about classes we decided to try a new seating arrangement that gives the children more space. This came from the kids themselves and I am happy to work with them to make our space more comfortable. 

During the week we read a book called "The Way to School". Each child used objects in the class to make the route they would walk to school if we did not have cars or busses. 

Next week we will talk about responsibilities at school and the children will work on a project called "If I were..". They get to put themselves in both my and Lisa's roles at school. 


Reading

We have started our reading program at school! The kids are being encourages to practice reading the first letter sound, using the picture and reading words that they recognize such as c'est, voici, le, la etc. 


Math- more about numbers

We continue to work to be able to look at a number and know its value at a glance. Some children are able to recognize 1-6 while some are working at knowing 11-20 at a glance. In the coming weeks we are going to work on decomposing numbers which is the ability to take a number such as 7 and know that 3, 4, 5, 2 and 1, 6 all make up 7 things. As you can imagine this flexibility of thinking helps with addition and subtraction especially in mental math work. 


Terry Fox Run and Mapping Skills

After the Terry Fox run on Friday we returned to the class and using the same objects we had out earlier in the week, the children mapped the route they ran starting with the school, to the turning point at the fire station and ending at the playground. The class really enjoyed this activity! 

What you can do at home:

When reading with your child: 


  1. You can track the words with your finger as this builds connection that the text as well as the pictures.
  2. Ask your child to tell the story from the pictures of a new book
  3. Ask your child to read the page of their library book by reading the first letter of each word (they may need some help moving from word to word)

Math activities:

  1. Count object by 1, 2 and any other grouping that your child can think of!
  2. Play games with dice and encourage your child to not count the dots on the dice, card games also help. Some ideas are: board games, playing go fish or crazy eights. 

Instead of "How was your day?":

Ask specifically about an activity at school. Here are some ideas :
* What math basket did you have? 
* Did you like the story today?
* What strategy did you use when you were reading? What were the books about?
*Who did you work with in class?
* Who was the special helper?
* What songs did you sing today?

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