Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a wonderful (and not too stressful!) Christmas break! The holidays are great, but it's also nice to get back into a routine. We have a lot of learning to do! 😊

• Starting next week, I will again be sending home reading pages for your child to practice at home. Every time he or she reads it, they color in a star. They will go home on Mondays, and should be returned on Fridays. If they return it with all the stars colored in (some kids even add extra stars for extra reading!), they will receive a Bear Buck.
• Please send your child to school each day with all their winter gear. We try to get outside as often as possible, and it's cold and blustery up here on the mountain! We have a few extra things here at school, but there are only a few sizes, and certainly not enough for everyone.
• Remember to send a water bottle in with your child everyday. It's super important now since the air is so dry, and the cold/flu season is among us!
• A reminder that library is on Mondays (unless something comes up), so try to have your child bring back their books if they brought them home.

• 1st grade is moving along in our phonics reading program, called Fundations. We have been working on what we call "glued" sounds, words ending with -ng and -nk. We call them glued sounds because it's difficult to separate the vowel from the ending blend (-ang, -ing, -ong, ung, -ank, -ink, -onk, -unk). We will be moving on to consonant blends next, and then combining all previous skills learned so far.
• 2nd grade is working on vowel teams such as ea, ee, ey, ai, ay, oa, ow, oo, oi, oy. They are working with these skills in multi-syllabic words such as raincoat, seaweed, railway, repeat, chimney, etc. We will then dive deeper into more complex long vowel patterns such as -igh, -y,- ie, -ei, -eigh, etc.

Both grades are continuing to work on critical problem solving skills, including understanding word problems with tricky language (extra information, what "each one" means, what twice as many means, fewer than and greater than, etc.) We will continue to learn and practice these skills all year long as a group. In addition, each grade is working on grade specific math skills.

• 1st grade will continue to work on addition and subtraction strategies, and move into place value.
• 2nd grade will be wrapping up place value, and return to adding and subtracting within 100.

We are beginning to learn about the months, the seasons, and patterns in nature. The kids love learning about how day turns into night, why our seasons change, and why in some places the weather doesn't change much with the seasons.