Can you believe how fast this year is flying by? I have such a great group of kids! I have a ton of fun activities to help keep them engaged for the next 2 weeks. I know they are antsy and energetic. Hopefully the weather will warm up some so we can go outside and play!

We finished up our unit on the author, Laura Numeroff, on Friday. Through her books, we were able to put our listening skills to the test! We also worked on our creative thinking and writing. In science we wrapped up our discussion on balanced scales. In math, we worked more on our positional words and ordinal numbers.

Today we started our unit on The Gingerbread Man. It is one of our all time favorite units! We made Gingerbread Man Journals for the kids to have at home to draw and write about their experiences at school as well as use it for their homework. There is also a gingerbread boy or girl attached to the homework assignment sheet for the homework activities. The new word wall word is “is”. Speaking of word wall words, have you ever thought about taking them off of the homework sheet and turning them into flashcards? The kids love to see if they are faster than me at saying the words. I bet they would love to try it out on you! (Hint: You can also add in flashcards of words they see a lot around our room like the days of the week, months of the year, names of math manipulatives, etc.)

Ms. Trainer will be back this week to sub for me. I'm leaving tomorrow after school for the sunny beaches of St. Lucia with some friends. She knows our grade level very well and will take great care of the kids. She will check the children's red folders each day for transportation changes and notes from home. Should you need to get a message to your child or to Ms. Trainer please call the front office. She will not have access to my voicemail or e-mail. I will only send Guided Reading books home today and tomorrow. We will have library on Thursday as usual and the Spear's Annual Holiday Sing Along Friday afternoon for the entire school. I've also scheduled my Room Moms to come in and read and do a special project with the kids. It's going to be a great week! Your kids will LOVE the Gingerbread Unit!

Thank you