Reminders:

• Please send in clean towels/blankets in on Monday (we are trying to keep stuffed animals at home and only bring those on special days. Thank you for understanding!)
• If there is snow on the ground or expected please have a bag with: snow pants, gloves (sometimes multiple sets), hat and winter boots. When boots are worn outside, the kids will wear gym shoes inside. Please try to label anything that belongs to your child. We try to make sure your child goes home with all winter gear each day in case it needs to be washed or dried. Thank you!
• Friday, December 22 9:00-9:30 Jingle Jog! Papers from Mrs. Miller came home this week. You are welcome to cheer your child on or run with! It is fun to wear Christmas colors, fun head bands or necklaces. Just keep in mind they get hot when running. T shirts are a great option! We are running with a 5th grade class so there will be more kids and parents in the gym. We will take a class picture when we are finished.
• Friday, December 22 10:45-11:45 Our classroom Christmas Party! I will keep an eye on the weather and if there is any chance of a snow day, I may change this. You just never know when we will get our next big snow! Also if you signed up to bring anything please send it with you child this week!

Highlights from our week:

This week we finished up our Nativities and read the full story of Jesus’ birth from our Bibles. We even had a discussion about how long we think God may have left the star in the sky for the wisemen to follow! I hope they have been able to retell the story to you using their boxes!

In Math this week we continued to study shapes. We worked in groups to make different things with a given amount of pattern blocks. As always, we continue to count everyday. We are now on day 75 of our school year and we will count by 1’s , 5’s and 10’s!

During Daily 5 we wrote our word wall words on ornaments with white crayon and then made them magically appear with red or green marker. We are also continuing to practice our sight words everyday!

In writing workshop we made a list of nativity words and a.list of things we want for Christmas. After learning last week about needs and wants I had one student tell me there wasn’t really anything he wanted as he has all he needs! I love to know they are listening and thinking about things they have learned!

During phonics this week we learned about writing from left to right, as well as how to use finger spaces and punctuation at the end of a sentence. We practiced making our very own sentence!

Caleb VanMaastricht was Up in Lights this week. Caleb’s mom and dad came to share about him on Friday and on Tuesday his mom brought his chicken, Dolly, for us to pet (or just look at if we preferred that;) Caleb is such a kind and loving friend who always makes us laugh and has the talent of impersonating both a weedwacker and a dolphin!! We are blessed to have Caleb in our classroom!

Finally, on Tuesday for our nature rich class, we took a walk and found “Christmas cards” in yards and sang Christmas songs while we rang bells. It was beautiful!