December

Dear Parents,
We hope you all had a restful and relaxing Thanksgiving break.  Our thanks
go to our wonderful parent and community volunteers.  With your help, our
program is much more successful and better meets the needs of ALL the
children!
Our themes for this month will be the Birds and Traditions Around
the World. This past week was dedicated to the Nutcracker.  We went to “Backstage at the Nutcracker” on  November 28th. The children truly enjoyed the performance.  Next week,  in science we will be learning about birds, their different beaks and feet and their feeding habits, habitats and flight patterns.
 Please notice birds in your neighborhood and begin to identify a few for your children. Then we will wrap December up with our Traditions Around the World unit. We will read some traditional tales and participate in some fun activities including an introduction to the globe and maps.  If you have a special cultural/holiday activity that you would like to share, please let us know as soon as possible.  
 
In math, we will be focusing on Chapter 4  Measurement and Basic Facts.  We still work on  place value, measuring, estimating, counting and writing numbers, along with solving word problems daily.  We hope to learn our addition and subtraction facts to ten and be able to do them quickly.  This will help us build on these facts as we continue to progress.  Please practice these with your children at home.

Writing is an integral part of our day and is woven into all content areas.  Skill areas of concentration will be beginning, middle and endings of stories as well as recognizing elements of a story (setting, main idea, characters, problems and how they are solved).  We have been very busy in the creative writing department.  The children are all excited about publishing their work. 
We will not have a book order this month due to the book fair and holiday expenses.

It was so nice to see so many of you for conferences.  Thank you for taking the time and coming in to meet with me to discuss your wonderful children!!

• Report cards will go home on  December 7. 

• There is no school on Friday, December 8.

• The Book Fair is the week of  December 11.

• Wednesday,  December 13  is an early release day, so school gets out at 12:00. 

• Thursday, December 21 is the last day of school for Holiday vacation.

Thank you for your support this year and we wish you a peaceful and joyful holiday season.                                   

 The First Grade Team