December News

Important Dates To Remember!

 

3       Hot Lunch Day
6       First Spelling Test
9       Les Bucherons arrive at MMH
10     Last day to request extra tickets
2,9,16Library Days
12     Christmas Concert at Southminster Church
13     Les Bucherons perform and "sugar shack"
16-20 Christmas carols in the gym daily 8:30am
18      Dress like Christmas assembly 8:30
19      Class party and all books due in library
20      Last day of classes before holidays
Jan6   First day back in 2014!

Christmas Concert

December 12, 2013 6:30-7:45 pm

Christmas Concert this year will be held at Southminster Church located at 1011 4^th Ave. South (across from the Yates Memorial Centre). All the children at MMH will be working with Les Bucherons, which is an artist in residency program to create and perform a selection of songs and dances all with the theme “Vive Le Francophone Culture!”
Each family with students attending MMH will receive TWO tickets, as seating is limited at the church. (Families that require more than two tickets (i.e. a family with more than two parents involved), are asked to submit their request in writing to Mr. Bryant by Tuesday, December 10th.)
Grades K-5 performers are to arrive at Southminster between 6:00-6:15 p.m. and can be dropped off at the east side entrance (on 11th Street on the east side of the building). Students will then be taken to designated spots to get organized to perform. All “ticket holders” will then enter Southminster through the front (main) doors.
The actual performance will take place from 6:30 to 7:45 p.m.
The second option will be to join a “web cast” of the concert! No matter where you are in the world, you will be able to log on and view the concert from the comfort of your own home! Details of exactly how to join in on this web cast will follow.
As we have done in the past, we will have a silver collection to help offset rental costs. This year we are also asking each family to bring a donation of non-perishable food items that can be donated to a local food bank. These can be dropped off in the main lobby as you enter the church.

Language Arts

We have been learning about Bears and will be finishing up our mini-research projects this week followed by a Bear Fun Day where grade one students will rotate through all the grade one teacher’s classrooms for a literacy or math activity that is --you guessed it--all about bears. My centre this year will be bear math problem solving and some of the other activities include tasting favourite bear foods, reading bear sentences and colouring to show comprehension of the passage, listening to bear instructions, and much much more!
The children have been doing a wonderful job on their sight words and word families each week! Keep up the awesome home reading! This month we will be learning to make lists and to write letters! (to guess who?)

Spelling Program

Today your child is bringing home their NEW spelling program in a small green/white scribbler. Instructions are glued into the front cover, but basically there are 12 words on the list and your child has highlighted the ones that he/she is responsible for learning for the spelling test each Friday. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to jot me a note in the agenda or send a quick email!

Sight Words For December!

Week One: said, look, see, on, not

Week Two: will, out, up, down, in

Week Three: today, day, yesterday, tomorrow, was

Math

We are moving into subtraction this month and our first mental math strategy will be counting back. Similar to counting on, except that we are going down the number line in the opposite direction! The key points for kids about this strategy are:
1. I can use counting back when I subtract 1,2,3,4 from a larger number. For example with the equation 8-3, the student begins with the “8” in their head and then counts back “7,6,5”
2. I should only use counting back when I subtract 1,2,3,4 because any higher and I might get mixed up with my counting.
I am also hoping to have time to squeeze in a fun 2D shapes/3D objects unit as well. We get to do a lot of hands on experimenting with objects in this unit, which will likely spill over into January and ties in nicely to the building unit we start in Science when we get back.

Science

We kicked off our Science unit about the 5 senses with a popcorn lesson, where we used all our senses to see, hear, smell, touch, and yes! finally taste the salty, buttery popcorn! Yum! In this unit we learn that each of our senses provides information about particular aspects of our environment; and that, together, the senses enable us to know things and do things that we would not otherwise be able to do, or at least not as easily. We will also learn about the function of our senses, how they are cared for, how they could be damaged and how one’s

own ability to sense things may differ from those of other people and other living things. Throughout the unit, we will have a chance to sharpen the use of our senses and discover “juicy” words to describe the information that our senses provide.

Social Studies

In Social we are continuing with Looking At Our World which includes distinguishing geographic features in our own community from other communities. By the end of the unit the kids should be able to identify some familiar landmarks and places in our community, and know why these landmarks and places important to Lethbridge (ie. High level bridge, Old Man River, Nikka-Yuko Japanese Gardens, Nicholas Sheran Lake). They also get to learn the differences between rural, urban, and suburban communities and will be able to find Lethbridge and Canada on a map! And if that were not enough, they also learn to use a simple map to locate specific areas within the school and community, ask for directions, and understand that globes and maps are visual representations of the world! Just the other day we took a peek at Google Earth and even found Mike Mountain Horse from both a bird’s eye view and a street view. The kids were pretty excited and will likely be asking you to find their own address! We also started creating a map of our classroom to show how a map legend works and to start thinking geographically.