Estes Extras...

We came back from Thanksgiving break and hit the ground running learning lots of new stuff! We had such a great week. We only have 2 weeks left until Winter Break.  Next week is a normal school week packed with lots of learning. The following week (week before break- 12/13-17) is a big week. I'm giving lots of heads up in advance. Tuesday and Wednesday 12/14-15 is our Christmas Around the World Brainstorm. We will be visiting lost of awesome countries around the world. 12/16 is our Holiday Party from 1:15-2:15. Parents are welcome. I will be sending notes home about these events next week too. At the holiday party on Thursday 12/16, we will have a student book swap. The cost of the book limit is $5.00. Please do not spend over $5 for the book. If you need help with the book swap, e-mail me- I will help you out! Friday, 12/17 is Polar Express day and we can wear our pj's.

Specials next week: Monday: Music, Tuesday: P.E., Wednesday:Spanish, Thursday: Art, Friday: P.E.

We visited the library today. All library books are due FRIDAY, 12/11! Please remember to bring them back by next Friday!

Carla celebrated a birthday this week! Happy Birthday!

A note to the parents of the boys: The boys in our class seems to really like to play with "shooting noises" and a motion with their hands or another object that resembles a gun. This is completely NOT tolerated and definitely  NOT allowed in school. I'm afraid the boys got the ideas from TV, video games, etc. These playful actions are getting out of control. I have written notes home already and talked to a few parents, but it's still happening. Please talk to your child again about this action.

The cold weather is upon us. Please dress your child in appropriate attire. We will be going outside for recess until it get way too cold. We can not go out now, if we have bare arms or legs showing.

We are have trouble buttoning, zipping and fastening our pants. I have buttoned every student's pants at least once or twice this year. Please practice this skill on pants and shirts. Their fine motor skills are still being developed in their hands, which makes unbuttoning and buttoning pants hard for their little fingers.

Academic Update:

Literacy: We started a new unit on counting. The first few books of our unit is about counting food. So, we talked about the food groups. We learned about the an family. The an family is all the words ending in an (can, man, ran). We are not really working on sounding out the sounds within the word, then putting them together. Our school librarian, Ms. Udall, has a tree in the library, where if you read a book to her as a first time read, she adds a leaf to the tree. We had 3 leafs added to the tree this week! Congrats to Meghana, Michael and Aylin. Keep working on sight words and keep reading!

Math: We started working on ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd). The first five numbers are the hardest to remember. Line more than 10 items up and ask in random order, what is the fourth item, what is the ninth item, etc. We also started learning which hand is right or left. Also, in this chapter, we are learning the numbers 11-20. Make flash cards of the number and quiz them. They often know it in their head, but will say the number backwards. For example the number 16, they sometimes say 61. We are having our chapter test next week.

Science: We learned about the food groups and about day and night sky.

We have started talking about Christmas since we will be doing a lot of Christmas activities the next two weeks. We learned about Hanukkah and made a Menorah, since this week Hanukkah started.  If your family heritage is from another country and y'all have special Christmas traditions, I would love for you to come in on Monday 12/13 and come in, share with us about them. We would love to hear all about the traditions. Please e-mail me if you are interested!

The school's e-mail was down all week. I'm sorry, if you tried to e-mail me. We were not getting any incoming mail and were not able to send any out mail.

Thank you to the parent volunteers this week: Sofia's mom at Literacy centers, Carla's mom for math centers and Camille's mom as our mystery reader.

Have a great weekend. Stay warm and if you are going to watch the SEC Championship, pull for South Carolina to beat Auburn! :)