Mrs. Henry's Classroom: Newsletter and Polar Express Day!

We are having so much fun in school these days! Many exciting things are going on!

We graduated from the Super Reader unit this week, and we met Super Reader himself! We went to the Common Room for a ceremony to celebrate and he gave us certificates! See photos below. This week, we learned that partners, AND PARENTS, give reminders to their reader buddy to use their powers. If a friend is stuck and the picture will help, we can say "Activate Picture Power!", etc. Helpful partners give hints and prompts when their peer is stuck, and they tell their peer the tricky word only as a last resort.

We also studied "Jingle Bells" this week. We had a big discussion about the vocabulary. What is a one-horse open sleigh? What are bobtails? What's happening in the poem? Then, we met the King of ING, who taught out about the "ing" sound. We searched for words that contain "ing" within the poem, and then listed a few more, too!

We began our study of Ezra Jack Keats' character Peter, who is in many of his books. We will be reading all of the stories that have Peter in them, watching him grow as a character. We began with Snowy Day and, on the day of the snowy morning, we made a matching craft.

In Writing Workshop this week we reviewed important parts of a narrative story. We checked our pieces against a checklist: does my story tell the reader who was there, where we were, what we did and how I felt? We also wrote a class book to give to Luke as a goodbye present.

We continued our unit on patterns in math. This week, we played a game called "What Comes Next?" and another called "Break the Train". We made pattern "trains" with cubes and tried to break them up into "cars" (repeating units). Then, we recorded our work.

We learned about Hanukkah this week and are lighting our classroom menorah each day.

On Polar Express Day, we made our own versions of the book, painted our own silver bells, then we cuddled up and watched the book being read. We had fun singing "Jingle Bells" and ringing our silver bells!

Great news! Our class collected the MOST pajamas for our K donation! Thank you again for your generosity.
News and Notes:

Book sleeves are due on Monday. We will NOT be bringing home new books next week. We are taking inventory and will start fresh in January. Please be sure to send all book sleeves in before vacation.
Please let me know if your child will be leaving for vacation early next week. I want to make sure everyone gets his/her holiday treats!
Don't forget to send in sneakers on days when your child wears boots to school. Students must have sneakers to participate in P.E.