December 5, 2014
Dear Parents,
It was a pleasure meeting with all of you for conferences. If you have any questions or concerns throughout the year, please don’t hesitate to contact me. We don’t have to wait for progress reports to go home or for scheduled parent conferences to have a conference. We can talk any time! You should all be very proud of your children. We have certainly enjoyed the beginning of the year with each of them!
Don’t forget to join us for our very own version of the Nutcracker Ballet on Monday, December 22nd at 9:00am. You won’t want to miss it! We have been practicing the dances for the Nutcracker and will be focusing on our Russian Peppermint dance for the performance a lot next week. If possible, we would like the children to wear red tops and black bottoms on the day of the performance but any combination of red and black would be fine.
We have been making our life-size Nutcracker characters that will soon be beautifully displayed on our classroom walls and in the hallway. I trace each student as a Nutcracker character and then students work together with other students in their group to decorate them. We have been very impressed with the students’ cooperation and hard work. We also kept busy this week working on our innovations, writing in our journals, learning poetry, decorating our gingerbread boys and girls, and reading stories. The students have been doing a great job working hard and focusing, even during this busy and exciting time of the year!
A few other reminders: It is definitely feeling more like winter outside and it is necessary for students to wear warm coats, hats, mittens/gloves, scarves, and boots (when there is snow). It would also be very helpful if they could practice putting these items on and taking them off at home to make preparing for recess and dismissal a little less time-consuming. You can probably imagine how difficult it is to get 18 students all bundled up to go outside!
Also… There seems to be a little confusion with book fairs, library books, and the Used Bookstore. Our school has a Used Bookstore periodically throughout the year where students can either buy a used book for a quarter or bring in a used book to trade. There is typically one per month and it is completely optional. We will have one on Wednesday, December 17th. If you would like your child to participate in it, please send in either a quarter or a used book on or before that day.
Our class went to the school’s Book Fair on Wednesday. The students looked at all the books on display and made wish lists. We tried to explain that just because the books are on their wish lists doesn’t mean that they will get them! If you would like to purchase any of the books on the wish lists, please send in money with the list of books you would like and our librarian will fulfill the order. I believe the book fair will be here until Tuesday.
Our class goes to the school’s library every other Wednesday morning. Students are given the opportunity to borrow one book from the library and bring it home to read. These books do need to be returned within the two weeks. We have a blue box in the classroom where we keep them until we go to the library again.
The only other books circulating around are our class books that the students worked together to create. These books have a class list on the back and need to be returned to school the following day so other students may also borrow them.
Hopefully this will clarify all the book confusion! Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Have a great weekend!
Melanie Duncan and Kerry Marsh
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