Weekly News

IMPORTANT DATES

• Monday, January 21st: No School, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
• Wednesday, January 23rd: Caldecott Night, 6:30 pm, Devotion Library
• Thursday, January 31st: 1MC Family Breakfast, 8-8:45 am

FAMILY BREAKFAST

We will celebrate all of the great work in 1MC with a family breakfast on Thursday, January 31st. The breakfast will be held  from 8-8:45. This will be an opportunity for your child to show you around the classroom and to share their great work with you. Any important people (parents, grandparents, siblings, babysitters) are invited. If you are unable to attend, please let us know and we will be sure to invite a special teacher for your child to share his or her accomplishments with. (Breakfast sign-up sheet will also follow).

COLD WEATHER and SLIPPERS

We will go outside for recess every day, unless it is raining or very cold, below 20 degrees. As the weather gets colder, please be sure to send appropriate outdoor clothing. This currently includes sweatshirts, jackets, and sometimes rain boots. In the winter, this will include heavy winter coats, hats, gloves, scarves, boots and snow pants.

Also, during the chilly boot-weather months, it is an option to bring slippers (with rubber, non-slip soles) to school. This will make for easy indoor-outdoor transitions, and give a warm and cozy feeling to the day. Your child is welcome to bring slippers (labeled with his or her name) and leave them in the classroom rather than take them home every day. We will have a place in the classroom to store slippers instead of leaving them in cubbies overnight.

   

If your child is missing a jacket or sweatshirt, please check the school Lost and Found, across the hall from the Main office.

MATH

We continued working with word problems, practicing our addition and subtraction skills, and counting money using Nickels and Pennies this week. We also began to explore "cross number puzzles" or "magic squares" to practice addition. This is a format to help children think about adding horizontally and vertically.

In the coming weeks, we will learn about dimes, practice adding to 10 and subtracting from 10, and counting by tens.

WORD WALL WORDS:

This week’s words:   who    what    when    where    how

This week, we will focus on words with  WH. We will talk about how the “h” changes the sound of the letter. WH can make an "h" sound like in who or whole and it can make a "w" sound like in what or when.  

These Word Wall Words are also question words, or words that begin questions. We will spend this week thinking about questions and question marks. We will also use question works to help add details to our writing.          

COMMUNITY

This week, we are discussing the many important jobs of people in our community. We are thinking of jobs within our school as well as jobs of grown-ups we know and jobs at places we go. Some of the jobs we came up with include: nurse, doctor, police officer, Lego designer, mother, father, robot maker, hair dresser, teacher, fire fighter, police officer, cook, and many more.

Next week, we will think about these jobs and name important places in our community. Then we will use our aerial map skills to study a Map of Coolidge Corner.

ANTI-BULLYING KICK-OFF

Devotion began its Anti-bullying program last week. We learned about our school-wide Anti-bullying rules (which we are calling "Rules to be a good friend.") and we learned about the many people in our school that are here to help us. We've spent this week focusing in on Rule #1: We will not bully others. We have described this rule in the positive; if we will not bully others, what will we do? We have come up with an extensive things we can do to follow this rule!   

LOCKDOWN DRILL

We will be having a Lockdown Drill on Thursday morning. This drill happens every year. We will talk about this drill on Wednesday, and explain it as practicing a way to stay safe in our classroom. One example for this drill is the rare event that a stray dog got into the school. We would not know if the dog was safe so all students must stay in the classroom and the principal, vice principal or police officers will go through the entire school to ensure that it is safe. 

Children are used to seeing fire fighters at our school during fire drills and police officers helping us cross the street during our evacuation drill. If you have questions or concerns regarding this drill, please let us know or contact the office.

ASK YOUR CHILD…

These questions can be conversation starters to discuss the week in school.

• What are some words that start with ch (or th, sh, wh)?
•  What was your favorite Caldecott contender book that we have read so far?
• What are some important jobs that people do in our community?
• What are some ways that we can follow our school rule, "We won't bully others"?