Happy December!

Hi Parents!

Happy December! I hope you are finding time to enjoy the first snowflakes and snowballs with your kiddos amidst the hockey practices, holiday shopping and seasonal get togethers! If your home life is anything like our school life right now, I imagine you are very busy! Thank you so much for taking the time to read this little blog post today to learn about the exciting things going on in our classroom.

As some of you have heard, we have a very sneaky little visitor in our classroom this month. “Louis le lutin” has graced us with his presence for the month of December (he’s on special leave from the North Pole with instructions to watch out for well-behaved students and to learn about Grade 1 and our firsties) and will be returning home in a couple weeks.

So far, he has played a few sneaky little tricks on us and has left us coded messages and sweet, personalized notes for the students. We are having a great time writing to Louis and practicing letter writing, proper letter format, capitalization of names and letter at the beginning of sentences, appropriate punctuation for our sentences, and much more! Every day when we arrive, Louis is up to something new and can be found hanging from the flag pole, playing games on the computer or drinking Madame’s tea. His silliness prompts excellent discussions and wonderfully creative writing ideas.

During math centers, Louis has brought us some fun number sense and numeration games and he is trying to teach us new tricks to make simple addition easier. Our favourite so far is with a number line

(like these ones that we all have at our desks). It would be great to practice this trick at home. The trick goes like this- if your number sentence is 4 +5 = ?, you start at 4 on the number line, then count up 5. Simple as that! J

We are also starting to work on subtraction and since Louis is always stealing and hiding things, we often have to figure out how many are left… This is a problem we are working on today:

Yesterday, homework bags went home for the first time and the students were VERY excited! Please remember to do ONE sheet with your child per book and ask them to color ONE monster on their bookmark each time. I will send home books as frequently as they are returned. Please DO NOT feel that you have to return the homework nightly. You can judge whether your child is feeling overwhelmed with the amount of work or whether they need more of a challenge. Also- I welcome feedback about the home work bags! Thanks!

Lastly, as you also might have heard, this afternoon we are having a little class party!! Each group of students earned 10 behavior points so we are celebrating together with games, music, balloons and our good friend Louis might even do “Le gigue des lutins” (the Elf Jig)!

P.S – Thank you to Isaac’s mom, Tania who has brought in some play doh for us! We are still looking for more play doh, and if anyone is able to make us some we would be very grateful. J