Can you believe all of this snow?!?!  Winter is here.....but will it stay? 😃

As the cold and wet weather arrives, please remember that the students need warm clothes for recess time. The students came in today with rosy cheeks and wet mittens. They were so excited about the snow! An extra pair of mittens and socks in their bag may be a good idea!

This week we are honouring Anti-Bullying Week.  At St. John the Apostle, we are focusing on the role of the bystander.  We have started talking about what bullying is, what it looks like and what it feels like. We have begun to identify the differences between real bullying and other behaviours. We also began discussing how important it is to say something if you witness bullying. We watched a video about being an UPSTANDER instead of being a BYSTANDER.  We are encouraging the students who witness bullying to do something about it. There are 4 main ways to be an UPSTANDER:

1. Be a Buddy

2. Interrupt 

3. Speak Out

4. Tell Someone

We are going to decorate our door to show the school how we feel about bullying. Stay tuned for pictures!

Here are some of the amazing things we will be doing this week!

Our word wall words are:

at, to

big, have, do

ride, here, them, eight, over

every, once, sister, happy, often

We played the game Roll, Read, Write! Ask your child how to play!

This week, we have continued our focus on the _et word family. We made a fun little book last week and this week, we are still learning about which words belong to this family. The patterns and rhyming are helping us on our reading journey!

We continue our study of the book, Harry the Dirty Dog. As we read the story, the students and I wrote down all of the words we did not know and now we are going in depth to learn more about them.  We are taking those words, creating our own definitions and learning about them in other contexts.  The goal is to integrate as many of these words as possible into each child's vocabulary. Vocabulary is such an important part of language so we will continue with these words all month. Next month, we will begin a new book and more words! It is going to be a good one!!

As we get more and more into the school year, the students are all taking steps to meet their individual goals! They have been doing more writing in their journals and I am so proud of them! Each time we write in our journals, I have a chosen topic for them.  We discuss possible sentences for them to write, brainstorm ideas and then they are off! With the many different learning levels in the class, their journal entries all look very different. Some students are working towards telling me a sentence orally that I scribe for them, while others are working towards 3 or 4 sentences independently. The students take this task very seriously and they are doing really well. It is so amazing to see the progress of each child!

Next week, we enter into the season of Advent where we are getting ready for the birth of Jesus. It is such an amazing a blessed time of year and there will be many exciting activities ahead. Please continue to visit the blog and our twitter account for updates and reminders. 

A reminder that we go to the Library every Wednesday. Please try and help your child remember to return their book each week so all of the students can enjoy the lovely books from the library.