News for February 4

News for February 4

This short week, the students continued the unit on fairy tales. We read Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a traditional version and compared it with a version where the bears and their house looked very different. We also learned a different version of the Three Little Pigs, by telling the story in a song. The children also compared the traditional story to the book, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, where the wolf tells the story and says the pigs got the story all wrong, that he was not a bad wolf at all! As always, more details about the books read aloud to the class can be found at our sister blog at http://planet5books.blogspot.com/.

The students learned the sounds, shapes and songs for the letters, A and T. We started to look at reading and writing word families. This week we looked at words ending in "at". Studying word families helps the children read easily decoded words and write them as well. When children can understand that when, for example, you remove the "h" sound from "hat" and add the "c" sound and get "cat", they are on their way to reading and writing independently. They learned how to use a paper device to help them learn the "at" family words. This was sent home with the children on Friday. A video of a child using this device and reading the words, can be found at the end of this posting.

The students worked on their rote counting and number recognition. Many students can count to 100! We count the days of school each morning as we work toward our 100th day of school, next Thursday.

The class learned about Chinese New Year. The students learned about red "lai see" or lucky envelopes that are given out on this holiday. It is also the Chinese Year of the Rabbit. Our morning education assistant, Annie, told us that these envelopes have money in them and are only given to children and unmarried adults. The children also had a drink with their snack using special little cups with Chinese writing on them.

The morning children went to an assembly in the gym. In the photo, try to find our assistant Annie.

There is also a photo of our afternoon class with our music teacher, Ms. McCool.