News Letter - P.M.
Dates to Remember:
Jan. 30-31 Hibernation Groundhog’s Day-Hibernation-Winter
Feb. 3-7 Groundhog’s Day-Hibernation-Dental Health
Feb. 4 Report Cards and IEP Progress Reports Sent Home
Feb. 10-14 Winter-Snow
Feb. 14 Valentine’s Day Celebration of Learning**
**students may bring 1 volunteer-trained adult from 1:30 to end of day
Feb. 17-21 President’s Day-Winter-Snow
Feb. 17 Schools Closed for students for President’s Day
Feb. 19 Conference Night
Feb. 24-28 Wrap up Winter-Snow-Hibernation
Conference Night
The school conference night is February 19th, please contact the office if you would like to meet. To help facilitate this meeting, send me a note to describe the purpose of our meeting.
Theme
This month we will focus on winter, snow and hibernation. We will have special day activities to address Valentine’s Day and President’s Day. In addition, we’ll explore dental health and open a class dentist office. In math, we are working on measurement to compare length or weight. We will use words like longer/shorter, heavier/lighter and taller/shorter. We will continue working on number concepts and reviewing shapes and positional language. We have extended number concepts with 10 frames and problem solving. For literacy, we’ll be talking about letters making words and using the sounds we hear to write words. We will continue to explore print (spaces between words, capital letters at the beginning of sentences, and punctuation marks). Please help us support learning by reviewing pages that come home, reading daily, and participating in the many home connections: literacy and fine motor folders and the monthly calendar page. Have your child draw a new picture to place at the top of the calendar they made in January. Then add the calendar page to the bottom. It’s a great way to encourage drawing and displays the days’ activities. Drawing is a way to express ideas and is also used in math to show problem solving.
Extensions
This month you can focus on the calendar of daily activities and using the literacy folder entries to underline words that start with a targeted letter. We encourage you to explore Jan Brett at www.janbrett.com/activities_pages.htm ; she is a great author and has activities to go with her books and characters; we will read several of her books this month. You can also practice having your child point to each word as you read a large print story. This builds 1:1 correspondence for reading and helps differentiate a word from a sentence. Check out www.starfall.com for letters, poems, songs, and math activities. Don’t forget all the sites on the Hampstead bookmark.
DID YOU KNOW?
A sharing of developmental information and ideas to promote learning at home.
+Sensory activities provide learning opportunities that are self-directed and open-ended. They have varied and interesting textures, smell, colors, or appearances and may have other uses.
+Children need repeated opportunities to solve problems.
+Children learn to remain engaged through the structure and routines provided in their environment.
+Hearing a wide-variety of words in conversations helps children expand their spoken language.