News for December 10

News for December 10

This week the whole school started the annual "Holiday Mailbox" activity. During the last two weeks before the winter vacation, children are encouraged to write/draw letters to send to other students and to staff members. This is a great opportunity to give students a real reason to write!
The students learned how to make paper chains. Using cut-up pages from magazines and glue sticks, the morning and afternoon classes each made paper chains long enough to make a garland reaching from one end of the classroom to the other.





























The students practised their number sense through several readings of the book "Dinner at the Panda Palace". They also learned that the sum of 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10 = 55. As always, the read aloud books are featured on our companion blog:
http://planet5books.blogspot.com.

The students learned and practised how to write the numbers 1,2 and 3. We also spent some time talking about the concept of place value. That is, helping the children to recognize that the position of the digits effects the value of the number (e.g., 12 is twelve but 21 is twenty-one).

The class practised the three songs they learned for the Holiday Concert on December 15th. First, we will be singing the Hanukkah song, "The Dreidel Song". Next the students will sing and sign, "The Peace Song" using American Sign Language. Finally, the children will sing "Feliz Navidad" in Spanish and English. "Feliz Navidad" means "Merry Christmas" in Spanish. The students also practised how to bow at the end of a performance.

The afternoon class had a chance to go to the gym and see a performance of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". It was a very funny play!

The students had a opportunity to build with plastic cups. Since the children have previous experience working with these, it was interesting how they used what they learned to make stable and more elaborate structures.

The students learned about a real cat named "Dewey Readmore Books" that lived in a library! Two books were read aloud to the class that were about how the cat came to live in a library and about one of his Christmas adventures. Here is a short movie featuring the real "Dewey":