Happy New Year!

Welcome back and Happy 2017!  We hope that you had a wonderful holiday season and enjoyed the time with your family!  The children were very excited to see each other on Tuesday morning and were ready to jump into school routines!

We welcomed 2017 by making new year's resolutions or goals for this year.  We reflected upon the year 2016 and the children wrote down some of their highlights from last year.  Then they made a goal for this year.  Ask your child about his or her resolution!

We had a fantastic field trip to the Flynn Theatre on Tuesday!  Cirque Mother Africa was a circus, gymnastics, and musical performance.  The children were dancing in their seats to the rhythmic music and African drumming!  Be sure to ask your child about all the amazing performances!  You can always check out Cirque Mother Africa on YouTube as well.  They have several videos from other performances.  Please note, we are going on another field trip on Friday, January 13th.  It is a show sponsored by the Flynn Theatre called Le Patin Libre; however, this show will not be at the Flynn Theatre.  It is hip-hop, lyrical, and modern dance done on ice skates!!!  We will be watching this performance at the Leddy Park Ice Arena in Burlington.  Since we will be sitting in an ice rink for an hour, please make sure your child is dressed warmly that day!

The start of the new year also brought the start of a new writing unit and a new reading unit.  During both reader's workshop and writer's workshop, we will be focusing on non-fiction and informational writing.  This week in writer's workshop, we talked about how many informational text writers write about topics they care about or know a lot about.  We call these people experts in those topics.  The children all brainstormed a list of topics about which they know a lot and then divided those topics into subtopics which will eventually become the chapters of their non-fiction books.  Ask your child about his or her expert topics!  We also read many non-fiction books this week and began to notice the features of non-fiction books and worked on finding the main idea and details of informational text.  We look forward to a lot of new learning during our non-fiction units!

Have a wonderful weekend!